SEATTLE--Cloudvox launched today, bringing unprecedented phone call flexibility to entrepreneurs and technologists. Any Web developer can place, receive, and control phone calls from their own application or Web site, with no new infrastructure.

Over the Internet, Cloudvox makes available "phone building blocks" like collecting digits, placing calls, speaking phrases, and starting conferences. Developers can mix and match these components to create incredibly customized phone call services. "This is the 'long tail' of phone-based services," said Troy Davis, CEO of Seven Scale.

"With minimal technical expertise and no capital, innovators can integrate phone calls into their products and services."

Open-source programming libraries are available for Ruby on Rails, PHP, Perl, Java, Python, C#, and other languages. All are free and based on open standards like Asterisk, AGI, HTTP, and SIP.

As a hosted "cloud computing" platform, users can sign up at http://cloudvox.com/ and be live in minutes. Phone apps can operate for pennies per day.

"Interest in using open source Asterisk in the cloud has been percolating--it's another important way for businesses to take advantage of many of the benefits that Asterisk has to offer," said Mark Spencer, CTO and founder of Digium, creator of the Asterisk telephony platform.

"By basing its service on industry-standard elements, Cloudvox makes it easy for companies to get up and running with customized voice services," Spencer added.

Cloudvox is used today for groupware collaboration, alerting and notifications, voice-based social media, scheduling, search marketing, and business process management (BPM) data collection.

"In an era of dynamic Web apps, phone infrastructure has been stuck in the last century: capital-intensive, hard to automate, and even harder to scale. With Cloudvox, if you can sketch it, you can build it," Davis said.