Anyway, Truecaller now has 600 million partly crowdsourced names and phone numbers in its database, which is quite a lot, and it’s decided to open up this information to third parties that can make good use of it. “Great,” you might think, “what a boon to telemarketers.” But no, Truecaller is rather sensibly hand-picking those developers who get to tap into its newly-launched, 3scale-managed API, and telemarketers are not welcome at all.

As for potential uses for this reverse lookup service, that’s up to the developer’s imagination. Here’s what Truecaller CEO Alan Mamedi suggests:

“Among many other scenarios, the Truecaller API could be used to save time in call centres. Each call centre minute is connected to a cost. By using our API, both local and global, call centres can identify who is calling even before starting the call. Win-win.”

Truecaller’s database is populated by two main sources: traditional phone directory services and users who are willing to upload their address books. This latter source means it can contain numbers that are unlisted, including pay-as-you-go phone numbers. Numbers in the database come with two types of scores: a “spam score” to rate how likely it is that they are associated with telesales or robocalls, and a “true score” to denote importance.

Importantly, name search will not be a function associated with the API – it will only be available on the mobile app, meaning the API can only be used for reverse lookup purposes.

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In a blog post, Twitter said you can now tweet photos from Glass to your feed — the update will include the hashtag “#throughglass” — and see your other tweets by turning on in-Glass notifications. The service is now available and users can activate the Twitter app on Google’s MyGlass portal.

Facebook’s Glass implementation is also live, though for now you can only share photos, not post status updates or view your newsfeed. You can, however, set privacy levels and add descriptions to photos you post using Glass’s speech recognition features.

Evernote doesn’t yet have an app per se, but it is integrating with Glass’s sharing menu, allowing you to capture a picture or short video and save it as a note in your Evernote account. It is also giving users the option of sending notes (from its web app) to the Glass timeline so your grocery list or crib notes are right in your line of vision.

At I/O Google revealed three other companies taking up shop on Glass. CNN’s app will put news alerts in front of your retinas. Elle is providing content from its magazines that can be viewed in the Glass display or read aloud. Tumblr lets you post content to your personal blog and get updates from Tumblrs you follow.

These companies join Path and the New York Times as the only official third-party apps on the Glass. For now Google is being rather conservative in its Glassware efforts, placing restrictions on the level of access to platform and banning ads or any other monetization scheme.

Still, once Google fully opens up Glass, it likely won’t have any shortage of interest. Smaller developers are already clamoring to get on board. For instance, Open Garden wants Google to expose Glass’s networking functions so it can link the headgear to its crowdsourced mesh network.

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Details other than that are sparse but in a blog post the company said it hopes to draw developers and partners wanting to learn about the “Dropbox Platform” and to meet the engineering and design team behind the Dropbox APIs.

Dropbox now modestly claims “more than 100 million users” and has caused considerable angst among IT heavyweights including Microsoft and IBM, but not necessarily for the same reasons. Microsoft launched SkyDrive — which as of Monday claims 250 million users – in part to catch some of that Dropbox lightning in a bottle.

IBM forbid the use of Dropbox by its employees, citing security concerns. In fact, many IT staffs across the board view Dropbox and other consumer-grade storage services with anxiety. Their worst nightmare is that employees will send and store sensitive corporate data to this public service. Dropbox has become the epitome of shadow IT.

Those concerns sparked an explosion of startups angling to be the “Dropbox of the Enterprise.

Dropbox has been making moves to make its business version more IT friendly. But the vast bulk of the company’s hundred million users are no doubt on the consumer service.

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Out of 1,500 mobile app developers surveyed, 22.5 percent are publishing for Amazon devices, according to AppAnnie’s inaugural Amazon app developer index published on Thursday. That’s tiny compared to its larger mobile rivals, but the big finding had to do with developers’ motivations: the Amazon Appstore is becoming an important outlet for developers, but not because they’re impressed with the company’s new hardware devices. Rather, AppAnnie found that the No. 1 thing driving developers to Amazon’s store is simple convenience: 52 percent said they already build Android apps, so it’s easy to port them over for Amazon’s store.

The other reasons they gave show Amazon still has a ways to go in convincing more developers that it’s an important and necessary outlet for their work. Among those already publishing on the platform only 24 percent said they did so because they “believe Amazon Appstore market share will grow,” and a meager 7 percent said they “believe the Kindle Fire will be a leading device.”

Some other interesting stats AppAnnie found:

• 56 percent of Amazon Appstore publishers focus on games
• Half say games are the leading revenue driver for them

AppAnnie sees big things for the store. There are already 75,000 apps on it and 19,000 developers signed up — which pales in comparison to 850,000 iOS app and 800,000 Google Play apps available — but the Appstore hasn’t been widely accessible outside the U.S. However that’s changing soon: Amazon announced last week it would be opening the Appstore to 200 countries over the next few months, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, India, South Africa and South Korea.

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The updates involve Open Graph, which lets users share third-party data with friends; Facebook Login, which lets developers sign up users with Facebook’s credentials; and the company’s SDK. Facebook explained in a blog post announcing the changes that it hopes to see more apps in its system:

“We’re launching three important products that further our transition to a mobile-first platform. We’re making it easier to implement Open Graph on mobile, improving Facebook Login, and releasing a new Facebook SDK 3.5 for iOS. We’re also announcing a new partner program to help developers integrate Facebook on a variety of mobile platforms.

More than 81 percent of top 100 grossing iOS apps and 70 percent of top 100 grossing Android apps integrate with Facebook. With the new tools we’re unveiling today, we’re excited to see even more high quality mobile apps integrate with Facebook to engage with our 680+ million mobile users.”

Facebook faces a tricky balance, though, between courting quality developers to build apps that integrate with its site and increase sharing and simultaneously maintaining quality control over the system. It also must prevent potential competitors from challenging it through its own services.

While the company previously saw great success letting companies like Zynga grow on top of the site, the issues with frictionless sharing that apps like Spotify faced, as well as recent challenges to Facebook’s core products, make that developer relationship a little more challenging. Still, the more that different apps keeps users interacting with Facebook inside the Facebook ecosystem, the better is is for the company’s bottom line.

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Session initiation protocol (SIP) is the signaling system used to manage IP-based voice and video calls and messaging capabilities in many carrier and enterprise networks, but it’s a protocol foreign to most developers. “What’s exciting about this news to the common geek is that Twilio is further establishing itself as the bridge between disparate forms of communication,” Twilio director of product management Thomas Schiavone told GigaOM.

Schiavone readily admits that no developer currently unfamiliar with the arcane ways of SIP is likely to pursue the protocol, but there are plenty of enterprises and enterprise developers that do, and they’re looking for easy ways to link their insular business networks to A broader range of public and private communications tools.

The idea is that Twilio can perform the complex translation of different kind of calls or messages in the cloud. A regular phone call from a landline, a VoIP call from softphone client or a WebRTC call from a browser could all pass through Twilio’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and connect as a SIP-based call on an office extension. “Twilio sits in the middle, allowing you to mix and match all these forms of communication,” Schiavone said.

Twilio’s SIP service, which launched as beta in October, aims to become more than just a translation service. Twilio claims that by connecting its cloud platform directly to legacy PBXs, companies can move the application logic of their communications platform into the cloud, where they can build new features without having to upgrade or reconfigure their hardware.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user 2 Much Caffeine

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NEA and Sierra Ventures led the DeveloperAuction funding round, and Crosslink Capital, Google Ventures, SoftTech VC and Step Partners contributed as well.

Last month I wrote about how venture capitalists were showing interest in DeveloperAuction despite its shortcomings, which span from monetizing a recruiting process that already happens naturally to using an arguably questionable word, auction, in the company’s name.

Even so, the site does operate on a concept that challenges the generic recruiting model. (According to a statement, companies have floated more than $225 million in job offers.) The idea of asking companies to appeal to job seekers strongly contrasts the usual way of making many job seekers compete for individual openings. It’s a refreshing approach. And Matt Mickiewicz, a co-founder and CEO of the company, told me in an interview last month that he wants to bring the DeveloperAuction way to other verticals.

The question is, how many types of jobs have consistently high demand and low supply in many geographical areas, as is the case for developers? Now that VCs have a stake, the question could become more important than it was when news of the company first surfaced a few months ago.

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To accomplish this the GSM Association launched a new initiative called the OneAPI Exchange at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The idea is to create an application programming interface (API) that any mobile app developer can use to authenticate new users against a carrier’s subscriber identity data. So far AT&T, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Vodafone have all signed on to the program, and together they represent a healthy chunk of the world’s mobile subscribers.

At first glance, the initiative seems like a nifty idea. If there is one thing every mobile subscriber in the world has it’s a phone number, making it ideal as a universal credential. But operators are also hoping to be more than just a username replacement. In a demo at Mobile World Congress, the GSMA showed off a bike rental app, in which carrier data was used not only to identify the user, but verify location and charge the rental to the customer’s mobile bill.

Obviously carriers are looking to make themselves relevant once again in the applications market and take a cut from any mobile transaction. This time they actually stand a chance of succeeding. Unlike previous API initiatives, the GSMA has actually figured out a way to make OneAPI near universal. Instead of tapping into separate APIs and crafting separate business agreements with every operator, developers just have to build to one API and strike one carrier deal, but the identity feature will work across all carriers’ networks.

The development house that built the OneAPI Exchange, Apigee, wasn’t able to eliminate the widespread fragmentation among carriers’ API platforms, but it rather ingeniously found a way around it. Apigee’s head of marketing, Dave Jordan, explained that the exchange acts as universal bridge between the operators’ disparate network interfaces.

A developer just picks a single operator to deal with and then builds to that operator’s API, Jordan said. If the app is downloaded on a different operator’s network the exchange will automatically map that carrier’s API onto the app, he said. For instance, if a developer were to pick AT&T’s API, any Orange or Telefónica customer could log in to the app using his carrier’s credentials, but AT&T would federate all of the transactions across those networks.

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Enterprises must pay to make Android and iOS apps with LiveCode. But that could change if the Kickstarter campaign succeeds in raised at least 350,000 British pounds, roughly equivalent to around $530,000. So far, with a little more than two days to go, backers, including Steve Wozniak, have offered to put up about 83 percent of the cash RunRev seeks for the open-source LiveCode. The open-source iteration in the works will support natural language, so as to be useful for people with little if any coding skills.

There are a few ways to help people learn how to code. Universities could put computer-science courses on an open-source site such as Coursera. (Other sites have made introductory materials available for free, too.) Developers can teach computer science to high school students. Apple could open-source HyperCard (it discontinued the software in 2004). Or RunRev or another company could make a free version of a HyperCard-inspired program such as LiveCode. These efforts have their upsides and downsides, but their shared objective certainly makes more sense now than it did in the eighties.

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The trouble is in the execution. To some degree, the site is redundant, because developers already get plenty of offers without using the site, and big fees aren’t always involved. The site hasn’t been promoted as much as it could be. It prioritizes salary above all else, even though some developers don’t. Despite the write-ups it garnered in the tech press, a handful of developers I spoke with for this article had not heard heard of the site. While auctions run in private to keep developers’ current bosses from spotting attempts to find better work, at least one developer was fired for using the site. And to top it all off, the company’s name calls to mind the antiquated, antebellum idea of selling people as products.

Nevertheless, co-founder Matt Mickiewicz told me venture capitalists are interested in funding the company. At nine employees, overhead isn’t enormous, and its business model allows for sizable revenues off transactions. The company is profitable, Mickiewicz said. Plus, it’s not Mickiewicz’s first startup: He’s co-founded a few startups, including 99designs, which has become profitable, taken on venture funding and expanded operations to multiple countries. Plus, he’s a compelling entrepreneur. In a recent interview, Mickiewicz confidently delivered smart answers to tough questions.

Value begets more value

VCs refer more companies to the site than any other group, Mickiewicz said. A talented developer is “one of the biggest value adds to add value to (a VC’s) portfolio,” he said.

Sure, the site’s concept makes sense for the developer segment, especially nowadays. The number of jobs in Silicon Valley increased by 4 percent from the second quarter of 2011 to the second quarter of 2012, according to data from California’s Employment Development Department that was included in the 2013 Silicon Valley Index. That high level of job growth hasn’t been seen since 2000.

The website says a typical developer will receive five to 15 requests from venture-backed startups for job interviews. Developers stay available on auction for two weeks and are free to take any offer, not necessarily the one with the highest salary. The first auction ran in September.

The company claims to be cheaper than a recruiter, but it’s not exactly cheap. If a company decides to pay a developer $100,000 a year through DeveloperAuction, the company pays either a $15,000 flat fee — 15 percent — or a $10,000 fee as well as the equivalent of $10,000 of the developer’s salary in stock options (10 percent plus 10 percent in options). DeveloperAuction even kicks in a small reward to developers as an incentive for using the service — 20 percent of the fee that the hiring company pays DeveloperAuction, which can be $3,000-6,000 or more, according to the site. That appears to mean DeveloperAuction rakes in $12,000-$24,000 or more per hire.

There’s competition, too. Besides more traditional hiring routes on company websites and job boards, so-called dev bootcamps have emerged as a new talent source.

Issues bubble up

However, last month the site received criticism on a few fronts in a Hacker News thread. Commenters complained about spam emails, shared alternative recruiting options (Pitchbox, for example), pointed out technical shortcomings and even called the company’s name into question. According to one user, “‘auction’ reminds me (of) the last time human beings were sold like stuff.” Another user reported being fired for using the site.

Developer Zac Shenker of Collusion, a company with a plan to make iPad drawings shareable with a nifty pen, told me the site duplicates and commercializes what already happens naturally to those looking for new jobs, whether on LinkedIn, over email or at networking events.

Recruiting managers at larger companies might be reluctant to use the site because of its emphasis on compensation packages above all else. A recruiting director at one webscale company who declined to be named for this article said the company would not hire people through DeveloperAuction, because finding people with the right character traits is more important than finding someone willing to work for a low price.

And while the model seems sensible now, with developers in great demand, the most talented ones will get gobbled up quickly, resulting in a drop in quality, said Chris Hollindale, chief technology officer at Hasty, a stealth-mode startup creating technology that aims to make people healthier.

Developers, customers abound

Mickiewicz sounded unswayed as I brought up the issues.

Regarding the comparison to slave auctions, he said people elect to join the auctions. That wasn’t the case in the pre-Civil War South.

“I think that’s a very unfair comparison,” he said. He emphasized that developers don’t have to work for the highest bidder. “It’s about who tells the best story at the end of the day,” he said. Developers, he said, want to make “a meaningful impact.”

Still, the founders might just have to consider changing the name, because it includes the word auction, he said.

Overall, Mickiewicz cited the adoption of the website among job seekers — 10 apply for every auction spot — and employers alike as proof of its value. “The employers are seeing very, very good success with us, compared to any other platform,” he said.

Hollindale intends to try out the site when Hasty is ready to hire another developer.

“To me, it’s a very interesting kind of twist on the whole technical hiring process,” he said.

Will the steady stream of developers availing themselves of the auctions de-escalate the tech bidding war? The answer to that question could determine the fate of DeveloperAuction.

This story was corrected at 9:17 p.m. with a revised list of companies that have hired employees through DeveloperAuction. Dropbox and Quora made job offers through the site but did not hire.

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