ribbit

BT's Ribbit releasing Google Voice competitor

Sure, Google Voice is cool, but it's not necessarily the best Web-meets-phone service one can imagine, is it? The field is still open, and switchboard-in-the-cloud company Ribbit (a division of BT) will stir things up when users get their hands on Ribbit Mobile, a new telephony service for consumers.

Like Google Voice as of last week, Ribbit Mobile adds services to your existing mobile phone number, using a standard telephone company service called Conditional Call Forwarding. You set up your phone service to route to the service when you don't pick up the phone, and it gives you all its features on the calls it then grabs: voicemail, forwarding, routing, and so on.

Ribbit Mobile isn't purely a mobile app, name notwithstanding. Rather, the "Mobile" means that your phone number becomes nomadic, moving to and temporarily setting up residence on whatever voice platform you want to use at any moment, be it a mobile number, a landline, or a VoIP system. Users set up their Ribbit Mobile features on a Flash-based Web site. Smartphone apps are coming, as is, most likely, another Apple app store approval drama.

Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs doesn't seem to want Ribbit compared directly to Google Voice, since Ribbit is a telephony platform company with ambitions well beyond the consumer app. Ribbit's revenues to date have come from its platform business. But Ribbit Mobile will be compared with Google Voice, and it's a fair and interesting battle.

Ribbit Mobile bests Google Voice in a few key ways. Its voicemail transcription feature will be better, although users won't get that feature for nothing. Free users will get machine speech-to-text, with likely the same quality of amusing and borderline-useless transcriptions as in Google Voice. But paid users will also have the option of using human-assisted transcription so their voicemail-to-text messages are actually sensible and useful.

Ribbit can also connect to VoIP services like Skype or SIP phones (Google works with phone-company phones and SIP, but not directly with Skype), as well as voice-chat features in some IM services, and you can transfer calls between phones while you're talking.

Google Wave meets conference calls, with Ribbit

It's becoming clear that Google Wave, which is slowly emerging from closed beta, has potential to be much more than a text-messaging platform. As the telecommunications platform company Ribbit shows, and as does a frothy little videoconference app from 6 Rounds, Wave's architecture makes it a compelling platform for real-time streaming communication.

The Ribbit team recently showed me their prototype widget, which lets Wave users quickly set up a conference room inside a "wave" message on the service. Once you add the Ribbit conference widget to a wave, everyone in it becomes part of a potential … Read more

BT launches Ribbit platform for developers

BT's Ribbit released its long-awaited Web telephony platform Monday to developers, which BT hopes will help spur innovation for new products and services in the telephony market.

Until now, most telephony advancements have been made by engineers at a particular company working on a closed, proprietary network. But now Ribbit is offering developers the chance to go behind the curtain and use its network to develop new applications.

Developers will be able to gain access to Ribbit's voice over IP SmartSwitch software, as well as a community site and support, monitoring, and management capabilities. The Ribbit platform will … Read more

BT bets on open development

BT, long considered a risk-taker in the telecommunications market, has laid a $105 million bet to open its network to application developers in the hopes of creating innovative voice services. But will other phone companies take a similar gamble?

Eventually, they will. But it will take time. Experts such as Will Stofega, a research director for IDC, say that phone companies must evolve beyond simply delivering phone and data services. In an age where voice has become just another application delivered over an Internet-based network, phone companies need to be at the forefront of developing new services and applications. And … Read more

Why BT spent $105 million on Ribbit

JP Rangaswami, managing director of service design at BT (British Telecommunications plc), has a vision for the future of the telephony industry.

"The telcos have lost control of the device. When you start building genuinely agnostic services, when you don't know the target device, it requires a different form creativity," he said. It's a move from closed networks to more open software platforms, and part of BT's transformation from a telco to a platform-based, software-driven services company. "Everything we do at BT is embeddable as workflow for customers. Voice is a feature embedded in … Read more

Under the Radar: Making the phone more Web 2.0

The Under the Radar conference kicked off this morning with one of my favorite panels: three video and voice companies that are trying to take services we're already using and make them better.

First up was Eyejot, which we've covered several times. The core service revolves around video e-mail, although it has recently moved into other areas like Eyejot This, which lets you annotate Web pages with video clips from your Webcam (and even share them via Twitter). There's also a platform that lets site owners add video notes and mail to their service.

There are two … Read more

Start-up Ribbit hops into Web telephony

Ribbit on Monday announced details of its Web-based telephony business, which includes a developer platform and plans for a voice service for consumers next year.

The company has built a telephony switch that can connect Web-based phone calls to a variety of phone networks, including voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, services like Skype.

As previously reported, developers can access those voice services through Flex-based application programming interfaces (APIs) and with Adobe Systems' Flash browser plug-in.

Through the APIs, developers can add the ability to send and receive calls from a Web application and transcribe a voice message into text. … Read more

Ribbit to bring voice to Web developers

A company called Ribbit came out of stealth mode this week, showing off a "phone component" that will let developers embed Internet calling into Web applications.

Company executives showed off the Ribbit Phone Component at the 360 Flex conference in Seattle earlier this week. The Ribbit application is written in Flex, Adobe's development tool used for writing Web applications, including those that use Flash.

"The Ribbit Phone Component will give rich Internet application developers the ability to make and receive calls, record/send and receive voice mail, as well as add and manage contacts," according … Read more