The company has already racked up some pretty hefty investment rounds, and its most likely next step is an IPO — if it doesn’t get scooped up in acquisition. A Twilio spokesman said that Twilio is weighing all its options, but an IPO seems like the most likely path.

Though it’s a hot company, few people actually get what Twilio does due to the arcane telecom world it travels in. It has basically teased out carrier voice and messaging interfaces all over the world and offered them up to developers as simple APIs.

A few lines of code in an app, and developers can send out text messages and voice calls just like the pros. What’s more, they don’t have to strike individual deals with the hundreds of carriers around the world or integrate separately with each of their communications APIs. It’s a model that global carriers have tried to pursue on their own, but so far they’ve failed miserably.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013

Correspondingly T-Mobile has said that smartphone users are consuming as much as 30 times more data than just a few years ago, and that appetite grows each year. Cisco estimates that global mobile data traffic is nearly doubling each year and will grow 13-fold in the next 5 years. As that growth comes at larger and larger scale, network operators are finding themselves at overcapacity. While the FCC is exploring ways to make more spectrum available, there is simply not enough to go around in the short term, and it’s only going to get worse.

This “mobile data crunch,” as we at Bessemer (and others) refer to it, offers one of the best investment opportunities there has ever been around telecom infrastructure. Here’s a look at a few key sectors we believe will experience outsize growth, and are investing accordingly. (Disclosure: Bessemer has investments in or a relationship with two of the companies mentioned in this piece; see below for those disclosures.)

New cell site technology

So if more spectrum isn’t available, how can carriers get more capacity out of existing airwaves? Many are looking to add new cell sites, as cellular spectrum can be “reused” at multiple locations if there is enough separation between sites. Carriers are very excited about moving to a “HetNet,” which will incorporate thousands of small cells – or low-powered radio access nodes that provide the same functionality as a larger tower for a small region. The HetNet will make the network vastly more complex, with the small cells adding thousands more points of interference that will need to be managed.

Companies like Ubiquisys are building intelligent software for small cells to make them more manageable within the Radio Access Network (RAN). Small cells also introduce complications with backhaul (that is, returning the signal to the core network). For all of their flexibility, they are often placed in locations where traditional methods of backhaul like fiber cables or line-of-sight-microwave are impractical or unavailable. Blinq Networks and Siklu are among the companies working on new methods of backhaul for otherwise hard-to-reach small cell deployments.

Offloading alternatives

An easier way for carriers to ease the spectrum crunch is simply to get rid of as much data traffic over their networks as possible, enabled by the use of Wi-Fi offload technologies from companies like AirSense, WeFi, and Devicescape.

Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility, told an audience he “has been preaching about” this for some time. But he’s done more than that – AT&T now owns hotspots at some 30,000 McDonald’s and Starbucks locations, which handle traffic from the network’s customers when they are in the store. This is more difficult than it may seem, as carriers need to ensure that the consumer experience on Wi-Fi is as good or better than using the mobile network. Bringing awareness of which hotspots are accessible and have a strong signal as well as being able to seamlessly transition a user between the cellular and Wi-Fi network without interrupting service are critical areas being addressed by new companies.

Network shaping

Finally, some startups are going directly at the core network with software solutions that optimize the flow of mobile data traffic. This is perhaps the area we are most excited about, as evidenced by our investments in Intucell and Vasona Networks (Note: Intucell was recently sold to Cisco, but I remain on the board of directors; Bessemer still maintains an investment in Vasona Networks).

Earlier this year, Intucell signed a multi-million dollar deal to deploy its self-optimizing network technology across AT&T’s entire U.S. network. Intucell’s solution optimizes the RAN by identifying in real time faulty or underutilized cells and adjusting their configuration automatically to provide the optimal level of coverage. Similarly, Vasona is leveraging its position as software in the network to deliver IP video and data at the appropriate time and bit rate over a given cell.

What makes us particularly excited about this last category? Carriers can test software solutions on their network at a low upfront cost and see proven results in a short time before committing to a more substantial order. From an investor perspective, this means shorter sales cycles and a more capital-efficient business: We are now seeing startups that have never raised money before yet have already completed successful trials with major operators.

Bob Goodman is a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners.

Photo courtesy of E.O./Shutterstock.com.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• A look back at mobile in Q1

Now we’re doing it, too. Instead of relying on the gut instincts, punditry and armchair quarterbacking that VCs are notorious for, our firm is pattern replicating to decide which entrepreneurs to fund.

Here are the components of a secret algorithm I developed that we use to score and rate potential investments with entrepreneurs.

1. We look at (and score) what you read

What content has been uploaded into your cerebral cortex via apps, websites, PDFs, books and other miscellaneous educational all matter to your eventual success outcome.What books have your founder team read and what have you posted in your social media feeds? If they’ve spent time reading Technology Ventures, Gear Up, Four Steps to an Epiphany and tweeting knowledge nuggets – quoting chapter and verse – that could lift their entrepreneurial success score via our proprietary algorithm. Posting to Twitter your snowboarding pictures from Lake Tahoe might say something else.

Chris Sacca has been quoted as saying he goes right to Twitter and reads the last 50 tweets before he even considers taking a meeting. In our new VC algorithm, you can scrape and evaluate multiple social media streams for what founders have read, uploaded, integrated, and executed. Quality is great, but we are really looking for the quantity of entrepreneurial material comprehended.

2. Age of cellphone number and time of first daily phone call

The age of an entrepreneur’s cellphone number reveals so much: their relative stability, how old they are, whether their number was a jettisoned friends-and-family program or an imported landline number. We get the age of cellphone number through a process called cellphone underwriting, which reveals all of the above and more, and which is perfectly legal but secretive enough that I won’t reveal how it works. At the end of the day, we’re looking for entrepreneurs who are young, stable, middle class, and who have the support of family and friends networks — and the age of the cellphone number tells us all those things.

So, I take the approximate age of a founder’s cellphone number and then during due diligence, I get a stat: The average time of their first phone call in the day. If you and your entrepreneur team are making and taking calls at 6:30 a.m PT, you’re probably talking with people back East and there’s a 50-50 shot you’re making north of a million in revenues.

So revealing data like this, that we used to W.A.G. (wild ass guess), we can now find out by using our firm’s make-shift cellphone underwriting API, which hooks in with Verizon and AT&T – the two main carriers of the iPhone. (And by “makeshift API,” I mean have our associate do it manually.)

3. How Othman Laraki are they?

Othman Laraki is a tale that is told inside of the VC community. He sold something big to Twitter. He has degrees from both MIT and Stanford, but also has a ton of street smarts. As an example of his street smarts, he squatted in 2,000 square feet of office space at Stanford’s Engineering building. That duality of street smarts coupled with academic smarts is a critical component of my firm’s algorithm.

A fund that is now underwater used to troll for deals in the basement of the CS lab at Stanford without taking into consideration the street-smart component. They failed to realize that you can’t just replicate what other people already did super long ago — you have to innovate a quarter step. That team of VCs is now begging for LP money in the pay-for-play conference known as “Venture Alpha.” (Spoiler alert: They will not make it to their next fund.)

We don’t talk about the data inputs for this street-smart metric but as a hint: Augie Garrido once said, “Question authority but follow the rules.” We are looking for entrepreneurs who question the status quo and tip-toe the fine line, but still firmly understand rules and existing hierarchies.

4. Stanford University founder team formula

If you reverse engineer the biggest exits, you can see that the whales in every fund’s portfolio had two or three founders from Stanford, with an odd-ball founder from some other school tossed into the mix. YouNoodle released public data on this observation. Our algorithm does not say “just Stanford.” It does say two or three founders from a good school with at least one in the litter that is not exactly like the others – think Cal, NYU, CMU, Illinois or MIT in a pinch.

Recently, Mark Suster, blogged about the phenomenon of overly homogenous founder teams. He argues that if teams are too similar where “all founders even have the same phone,” the founders will likely follow versus lead.

Remmy Oxley is the pseudonym of a Silicon Valley VC. Follow him on Twitter @RemmyOxley. 

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

But, as more and more consumer commerce is carried out online through etailers that operate independently, how can customers gauge sellers’ trustworthiness?

That is a problem Denmark-based Trustpilot has been trying to crack in Europe since it was founded in 2007. And now it is taking on a further €10 million ($13 million) to fund entry to the United States (announcement).

The money comes from Index Ventures, which is joining previous  backers SEED Capital Denmark and Northzone, which gave €4.5 million a year ago and which think Trustpilot’s method of letting buyers rate and review merchants will be big. CEO Peter Mühlmann writes that he wants to double staff from over 100 in the next year.

Trustpilot says: “The benefit for businesses using Trustpilot is that they can backtrack each customer review to the transaction on which the review is based. This helps businesses pinpoint where and how to improve customer satisfaction.”

But, as it tries to unlock the large US market, the outfit may nevertheless still face challenges at home. Despite operating in the UK, France, Germany, Netherlands and Italy, I have never heard of it; it simply would not have occurred to me to use it to find trustworthy sellers.

That means it is starting from a lower base in the States. But Trustpilot also supplies reviews to Google product search pages — a place where people are more likely to see them.

But Trustpilot claims merchants who display its reviews on their site can increase purchase conversions by 20 percent. Its focus on providing value to businesses through highlighting positive reviews seems to take second place to providing a service to consumers.

The service claims to have garnered over six million reviews of over 100,000 merchants.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• How social discovery is transforming entertainment

Netherlands-based Cleeng, which we have previously reported on and which facilitates payments through blog CMSes and other suites for outlets including La Tribune, Dailymotion and VentureBeat, is raising a €400,000 ($511,000) investment to try targeting U.S. business.

Amongst the backers is Pascal Cagni — until his resignation this May, Apple’s VP for Europe, Middle East, India and Asia — who says (via release):

“Through my 12 years leading Apple in Europe, I was uniquely positioned to monitor how the digital revolution can be disruptive and make monetization challenging. In the meantime, the proliferation of mobiles devices is on par with the acceleration of content digitalization and has broadened market reach in an unforeseen fashion. The opportunity to offer a simple, straightforward, robust solution to monetize content, being TV programs, videos, or live events is simply huge.”

Meanwhile, central European buffet payment facilitator Piano Media is trying a limited addition of paid video to its system that already charges users to access sections of several newspaper and magazine websites.

The video is from Zuzana Piussi, a Slovak filmmaker who could face two years in prison if convicted for her controversial film about the Slovak judiciary. Her latest film, about Slovak politics, is being distributed only via the Piano-powered paid part of weekly news magazine Týždeň’s website.

“The multiplex cinemas were against distributing the film after the controversy surrounding my last film,” Piussi says (via release). “Therefore, distributing the movie online, for me as the creator, is now the only way forward.”

Piano Media is better resourced than Cleeng for geographical expansion, having raised a €2 million second round in April. But Piano’s three launched countries so far — Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland — are all in Europe while Cleeng already appears to have ambitions of breaking in to the States.

Other Cleeng backers are unnamed private investors.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?

The outfit is taking $25 million from Mistui Global Investments and Orix Ventures, saying it is ”setting its sights on the Asia-Pacific region”.

Kaltura’s online video platform is supposedly used by over 300,000 clients, including in the enterprise and at media companies, who can either buy in Kaltura’s own commercial service or host its open-source software themselves.

The outfit already expanded in to Europe earlier this summer. VentureBeat has called Kaltura a ”next billion-dollar enterprise tech company”. It has previously raised a $2.1 million first round, a big $21 million second round in 2008 and a $20 million raise from Intel Capital and others in 2011.

Vietnam and Hong Kong are Asia-Pacific’s top online video-viewing countries, according to comScore (and via Digital Strategy Consulting)…

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Smart TV forecast: gigabit Wi-Fi in the living room
• Where the next-generation console fits in today’s video game market
• How consumer media will change in 2013

Peter Chernin, who left News Corp in 2009, has invested $10 million in Base 79, an agency which exploits video rights for content owners in online video channels including YouTube. There, it operates 550 channels, from which it claims 550 million monthly views. Release.

The investment is fresh from a $100 million financing Qatar Holdings is putting in to  The Chernin Group, according to AllThingsD, joining Providence Equity Partners and others. The group also has investments in Flipboard, Tumblr and Scopely.

Base 79 was formed in 2007 in London by former The Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie’s son Ashley as MyVideoRights. It changed its name in 2011 and opened up in New York to exploit the booming U.S. video opportunity.

At that time, it took an extra £2.75 million funding from previous backers Patrick Walker (YouTube’s EMEA partnerships director), ex Endemol creative chief Peter Bazelgette and MMC Ventures to finance development of mobile and TV apps, deciding to build video in to own-brand containers rather than just go through platforms like YouTube.

Base 79 is, however, a recipient of YouTube’s first European original-productions financing last month, a grant for four such productions.

MMC has returned to join Chernin in this latest funding.

Base 79 leverages content from producers including BBC Worldwide, Endemol’s Tiger Aspect, IMG Media and Simon Cowell’s SyCo.

What we are seeing is the emergence of hotly-tipped companies that depend on existing mass video platforms and which either syndicate video to them, produce it for them or both.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room

The answer, it seems, is in the affirmative. The backers of the Vision+ Fund have just spilled some stats around its first €3m ($3.8m) of investments into 19 products – remember, the fund invests in products rather than whole companies – and it seems like the idea is indeed taking off.

“Finding takers has not been a problem,” Ojanperä told me. “It’s about focusing on the quality and finding the right fit for the model. We have proven and tested the model and the next step is focusing on getting the first product to market.”

GREENi, one of that first crop of 19 products, is a great case in point. The company has an existing business in helping golfers track each other round the course, but now Vision+ has invested in a new app that lets people track their favourite pro golfer. The fund’s investment (effectively an interest-free loan) secures a share of future revenues from the new app, rather than taking equity in the existing business.

Quite a few of the investments are into games, such as Mike Vick: GameTime by U.S.-based KBJ Games, Hit No Hit from L.A.’s Moeo, a new multi-platform mobile game from Finland’s Tribeflame, the amusingly-named Total Recoil, and 10 games from France’s Mando. On the more serious side, there’s also the carbon footprint calculator Ecompter, which is aimed at hotels and meeting venues.

And on a somewhat grander scale, Vision+ has also invested in three new top-level domains, namely .city, 在线 (.online in Chinese) and 中文网 (.website in Chinese). The risk here is that these new TLDs don’t get granted, but Ojanperä reckons the team behind them will meet with success in this regard. No doubt the returns will be huge.

Of course, this is just the start. Ojanperä says the Vision+ Fund will close sometime next year with €50m-€100m in capital and a “couple of hundred projects” on the go.

It’s an unusual approach to tech venture capital, but the early signs are promising. Now Vision+ just needs to help get these products on the market. If the revenues flow, the model will really have proven itself.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Scandinavian’s Schibsted is following its spring acquisition of the Aspiro music service by purchasing 10 percent of Danish ebooks service Riidr, ArcticStartup reports.

Kobo-like platform Riidr is a service for reading .epub and watermarked ebooks through a simple web interface or through iOS and Android apps. So far, its titles are only Danish and Swedish. Riidr also lets readers move those titles over to Kindles, thereby growing the Scandinavian repertoire on Amazon’s device.

Aftenposten newspaper publisher Schibsted is one of the largest news and magazine publishers in Europe and Scandinavia and is diversifying from newspapers with this investment.

Schibsted CEO Rolv Erik Ryssdal wrote last month that the company has gathered its news content, classified and other payment efforts, started at its Fædrelandsvennen title, up together with others from its digital portfolio into a groupwide program it’s calling Schibsted Payment:

“[The aim is] to facilitate simple payment solutions for all of our companies’ customers, for buying everything from second-hand bikes on FINN.no to quality content in our newspapers.”

“We must lead the way in finding new quality content and new sources of revenue. We must derive most of our revenues from digital courses.”

Riidr and Aspiro are two ways Schibsted may get to build competency in this area.

Riidr tells ArcticStartup newspapers may get to offer its ebooks through their web pages.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• Will Standardizing the Cloud Cause Clarity or Confusion?
• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past

Salerno-based 4W Marketplace, which powers the Premium Publisher Network, is taking the money from VC house Principia SGR.

In an announcement, the firm says:

“The investment will be directed towards the strengthening of the technological department for research and development in the computational advertising area and the development of new cutting-edge internet advertising models.”

That work will be carried out together with 4W Marketplace’s local university.

The Premium Publisher Network was formed by newspaper groups RCS and L’Espresso three years ago and now numbers dozens of members including broadcaster Rai and paper La Gazzetta della Sport and La Repubblica.

4W Marketplace is the network’s exclusive ad provider, having been started by the Digital Magics incubator, and currently offers contextual, mobile and social ads.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• Will Standardizing the Cloud Cause Clarity or Confusion?
• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past