Mashup "contests," a popular way to spur rapid development of new Web apps, are coming to the world of telephony.

Sylantro Systems, which makes telephony application feature servers, and The Thomas Howe Company, a telephony mashup application developer, are hosting a telephony mashup contest with winners judged and announced at Sylantro's user conference in Las Vegas at the end of this month. (Information on building a mashup for the contest can be found here.)

Mashups are made by "mashing" together content and features from multiple locations via publicly available application programming interfaces (APIs). They've become popular in the Web area, but as telephony providers and application vendors begin to open up their own systems via APIs, adding voice and call management features, telephony mashups are becoming more possible.

Developer Thomas Howe made his own name in the mashup world by winning a telephony mashup contest sponsored by O'Reilly Media. That application, dubbed "After Hours Doctor's Office," involved transcription of office voicemails that were then sent off to a doctor via short message service, an on-the-fly mashup of voice, voice-to-text and text messaging capabilities. (Listen to our podcast conversation with Thomas here.)

Telephony mashups are a good example of the power of open telephony APIs, said Marco Limena, CEO of Sylantro Systems. "We believe that reinventing voice is the single biggest opportunity available to service providers today,” he said. From an application perspective, carriers should be thinking about "taking voice and embedding it [as an application feature] in every aspect of a user's life," he added.

Look for Sylantro to deliver new features on its telephony application feature server to further enable voice/Web integration at its upcoming user conference, Limena said.