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Ribbit

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Ribbit, self-proclaimed “Silicon Valley’s first phone company,” aims to be the next platform company for Voice 2.0 applications.

At its core, Ribbit has built a telephone switch in software, known as a soft switch. It works just like a switch made by Lucent or Nortel, except that it is software running on hosted Linux servers. Ribbit’s soft switch can send calls to regular phones, mobiles, Voice-over-IP, Voice-over-IM, and Web pages. It supports many voice protocols (SIP, Skype, Google Talk’s XMPP).

If Ribbit’s plans succeeds, its platform will allow thousands of new phone apps to appear soon, and they almost all will be Flash apps. Already, about 600 developers have built Ribbit apps under certain restrictions. All of these phones can call other Web-based phones (including Skype), VoIP phones, or regular landline and mobile phones. Ribbit handles the calls and other voice-related services (call logs, voice messages, speech-to-text transcription, contact imports, directories, provisioning, billing, security, authentication) and provides the APIs to developers, who build their apps with Adobe’s Flex development tools.

Ribbit’s selling point comes in the fact they understand that sending phone calls over the Web is not interesting. What is interesting, is that it allows developers to create voice apps in a familiar Web application development environment that can easily be linked to other Web applications.

As an example, Ribbit created a demo for Salesforce.com - see screenshot below. The Ribbit phone will not only let sales people make calls to prospects directly from the browser-based CRM application,but will also log the call. Future releases will allow users to record portions of a call at a click of the button and transcribe it (Ribbit uses speech-to-text technology from PhoneTag).

Milestones

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• Ribbit — Ribbit Acquired by BT For $105 million (7/29/08)
  Posted 7/29/08 at 6:38am
• Acquired by British Telecom for $105M. (7/29/08)
  Posted 7/29/08 at 6:35am
• Ribbit — Ribbit launches Ribbit for Salesforce (5/6/08)
  Posted 7/15/08 at 7:48pm
• Ribbit — Ribbit launches Publicly (12/17/07)
  Posted 7/15/08 at 7:42pm
• Received $10M in Series B funding. (12/1/07)
  Posted 12/17/07 at 8:26am
• Received $3M in Series A funding. (10/1/06)
  Posted 12/17/07 at 8:27am
• Ted Griggs, Co-Founder, CEO added.
  Posted 12/17/07 at 8:23am
• Crick Waters, Co-Founder, EVP, Strategy and BD added.
  Posted 12/17/07 at 8:25am
• Chuck Freedman, Director of Developer Platform added.
  Posted 12/17/07 at 8:25am
• Peter Leong, Co-Founder, VP Network added.
  Posted 2/24/08 at 11:44am
• Ramani Narayan, Co-Founder, VP Applications added.
  Posted 2/24/08 at 11:44am
• Don Thorson, VP Marketing added.
  Posted 2/24/08 at 11:44am

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Sources

1. ZDNet (news.zdnet.co.uk) [edit]
2. techcrunch.com [edit]
3. techcrunch.com [edit]
4. Rabbitting on Ribbit (blogs.ft.com) [edit]
5. Ribbit for Salesforce makes sweet sounds for enterprise users (venturebeat.com) [edit]
6. techcrunch.com [edit]