BroadSoft today announced a contest aimed at encouraging developers to build voice "mashups" for its voice over IP platform.

BroadSoft has been building its developer story over the past few months, releasing an upgrade to its BroadWorks platform, building a developer marketplace and most recently releasing new, more Web-native RESTful interfaces to its platform.

The latest step is to go the mashup contest route, a path first blazed by vendors like Sylantro and Microsoft and carriers like British Telecom, with admittedly mixed results. In recent weeks and months, many of the early advocates of the Web mashup approach have back-tracked, though BroadSoft remains steadfast in its belief – and emboldened by its large base of telco licensees and end-user VoIP customers – that it can make the voice mashup approach work.

“What differentiates our program is that this isn’t just a simple set of APIs and a forum for developers to talk and chat,” said Mike Lauricella, director of marketing for BroadSoft’s Xtended platform. “We’ve got the customers and the marketplace to push these applications out to the forefront with real customers.”

The Xtended Voice Mashup Contest will run through September 2 and focus on applications that combine BroadWorks’ VoIP platform with other applications, including customer relationship management, business collaboration and social networking. Developers will compete for the top three prizes, valued at $15,500, $5,500 and $3,500. Winners will be announced at the popular Web 2.0 Expo, Sept. 16-19 in New York. Winners will also get to show their mashups to telco users at the BroadSoft Connections 2008 executive users conference, held in Phoenix, Arizona from Oct. 5-8.

“That’s the key opportunity for developers -- the ability to go out and promote their applications at Connections or on the Xtended marketplace,” Lauricella said.