I got a great email today from Andres Krogh giving us a heads up about his new site called iamsaintnick.com which allows relatives to find out what their loved ones want for Christmas.

His elevator pitch goes as follows: “Folks can go to the site, punch in a phone number, and have Santa go call that person to covertly get gift ideas.  The call happens live on the site, and the call is recorded for the user to hear after the Santa recon is complete.”

Iamsaintnick was developed by Matt Steckler, a developer who recently lost his job at a tech startup two months ago, and designed by Andres Krogh. The telephony is powered by Twilio which was launched a only a few days ago see our review here.

What is truly impressive is that a few days after the launch of Twilio, Matt and Andres designed, spec’d, and built iamsaintnick from the ground up in the 4 days since their public launch…Well done guys

The only issue we could find was that they don’t yet announce that the call is recorded, which is a requirement in some States, and is especially important when dealing with children. But it sounds like this will be added soon. Edit: There is now a mention at the beginning of the phone call that says “this call is being recorded” to try and make it extra clear.

Check it out at iamsaintnick.com, its a great little seasonal project which has lots of potential (voice recognition product suggestions maybe?) which should give you some ideas of how you can leverage the recently launched Twilio in your own applications.

Twilio launched in private beta last week (and is now available for all), and is promising to bring some radical changes to web telephony services by enabling web developers through its simple REST API, and a simple pay as you go billing philosophy.

Thanks to Twilio you no longer have to deal with complex infrastructures, telecom programming languages, and stacks of PBX software to implement inbound and outbound phone applications.

Twilio’s CEO Jeff Lawson says that while many other web telephony services already exist (like Asterisk, an open source project), these technologies tend to be very complex and difficult to use, even for experienced developers. Lawson says that Twilio is looking to commoditize these phone services by making them much more accessible to developers, by introducing a set of very intuitive commands.

The Twilio REST API primarily consists of 5 commonly used phone actions:

• Say
• Play
• Record
• Dial
• Gather a phone number

Thanks to these, its very easy to replicate some of GrandCentral’s core functionality in only around 15 lines of code!

Twilio is adopting the cloud service model, where no contracts are required and where you are charged flat fees for calls depending on the number of minutes used and the number of phone numbers needed.

We really like Twilio, as it has comoditized what used to be a dark art which usually involved a lot of hardware, software and lines of complex code to achieve. Plus its a perfect example of a really attractive startup prime for an aquisition, featuring a great idea, great packaging, a talented team, and some great team experience (CEO Jeff Lawson was a Product Manager for AWS).

Check it out at Twilio.com

Twitter is great but following someone leads to them receiving an email notification that a potential “stalker” is following them…Damn, the plan is foiled you think! Well don’t worry TweetStalk is here and it allows you to “follow” Twitter users without them knowing you are doing it. Normally Twitter will tell you when someone new has subscribed to your feed, but because this uses a Firefox Add-On and appears to modify the Twitter page itself via Greasemonkey you are then able to follow the person without them knowing.

On top of that, theres a neat RSS feed available too!

Looking at their tracking, it looks like Nashville, TN based Sitening are behind the service. For the record Sitening are a technology focused web design and search marketing company which have previously released the sweet Snipplr and Raven SEO Tools.

Click here to check out TweetStalk today.

The concept of the site is very interesting, which comes along with a simplistic interface. Register a user name, make a password, and start remembering! It should be interesting to see how this site pan’s out down the road, we’ve sure pulled up a chair!

Jon explains the simple four step process in the video below:

intersquash demo from jon on Vimeo.

What I find most impressive is how much Calum has achieved in such a short space of time. Starting pplparty when he was just 15 he now heads up a 10 man team in his London office.

At 17 I went to work for Doug Richard (one of BBC2’s Dragons from Dragons Den) and his team for mobile texting company Trutap. I was working alongside world-class people with backgrounds ranging in companies such as Yahoo, Ebay and T-mobile.

When I first started the business I was working from my bedroom at my parents house whilst doing my GCSEs, then I had our whole team working from my front room until just a few months ago when we moved into office space.

In the time since the pplparty launch in 2005 the site has gained a fair bit of traction currently boasting over 400,000 members. Whilst it still has a fair way to go to make a dent in some of the big boys it seems to have a thriving community and should continue to grow with the recent sexy rebrand.

It’s a simple concept that isn’t completely ground breaking but I really like the way they’ve stripped down all the unnecessary features and kept everything simple and to the point. I managed to setup an account and start chatting in under a minute.

Here’s me testing the site with Mike from WPcandy.

I dropped the sites owner an email and he was more than happy to give me a bit more information on where the idea for the site came from.

There is one very important thing to keep in mind. The future of human development, as electronics, computers and machines take more and more jobs that humans did in the past, is – simplicity of use and not complexity! More simple the devices, software and hardware will be, while focusing on core functionality, more things you will be able to do. When I was studying engineering I remember when we went to visit an underground coal mine, and conditions for both workers and engineers were awful. So, I thought to myself, why are all these people here? Through simple global collaboration of individual technicians and engineers where they can quickly exchange 3D data and talk live a consortium could be set up and massive robotic mining systems could be manufactured to replace at least half of those people under ground, while they could be sent to surface to control those robots through network channels. Each worker could thus dig more ore and do less work.

I really like this site and service. I’ll be using it for sure.

Qbox has found a way to utilize this massive collection of music.

Our player essentially works like a remote control that lets you take control of all the social network music available for streaming.

There is also a desktop application that I unfortunately couldn’t test (I’m on a mac and currently it’s windows only) but this video outlines some of the features of the software.

RedKaroke lets its users sing, record and share karoke songs. It has a surprisingly large collection of music for users to sing along to and each has the lyrics that flash up on screen as your singing.

I signed up with the intent of recording a song and embedding it here but after numerous failed attempts (nothing at all was wrong with the system, just my singing) I decided to embed a song from one of the sites top users.

This embed is just an audio track but users also have the option of recording a video to go along with their singing.

The two co-founders (and brothers) Miguel and Richard Ferreira had the original idea. They both have years of experience in the Spanish internet industry, having worked for Yahoo! Spain, Terra.es, and Ya.com. They saw the increasing popularity of music shows, and worked through the technical difficulties, ultimately coming up with the Spanish site, RedKaraoke.es which proved to be very successful. This is the international version which launched recently.

I’d love to see some indiestartups.com readers trying to do some karoke. If you feel brave post links to your attempts in the comments.

When twitter goes down, twitabit steps up. It lets you que up tweets that will then be submitted the second twitter comes back online.

I’m haven’t tested this out yet (twitter is currently up!) but it looks like it’s a handy little app for twitter addicts. Stick it in your bookmarks then next time twitter goes down you’re covered.