New company encourages phone applications

by Nancy Gohring

December 17, 2007 —

A Mountain View, California, company is launching a platform designed to let
developers create telephony applications they can embed in Web pages and existing
Web-based services.

Ribbit's back-end technology includes a software switch that essentially connects
Internet-based voice communication services with mobile phones, landline phones
and text messages. On top of that connection is the Ribbit API (application
programming interface) that lets developers build applications that unify the
wide variety of communication methods.

Developers can build applications that include functions such as recording,
sending and receiving voicemail, and making and receiving calls. The applications
can be built using Flash, embedded into any Web site, and integrated into existing
Web-based services. The platform supports many existing Web-based calling services,
such as Skype, GoogleTalk and MSN.

Developers can charge end-users for the applications, and Ribbit can handle
the billing for them. There are several ways developers can offer and charge
for their products, and in some cases Ribbit will share revenue with developers.

Ribbit showed off one application a developer has created that embeds phone
capabilities into Salesforce.com. By keying a code into a mobile phone, users
essentially replace their current voicemail with Ribbit
for Salesforce. Then users can listen to or see text transcripts of their
mobile voicemail messages within Salesforce. They can send the messages to colleagues
and tag them for easy sorting later.

Users can also make and receive phone calls through their Salesforce page.
Such calls are automatically logged in their Salesforce application.

Ribbit for Salesforce will cost US$25 per user per month for end-users. It
is currently in a private beta with more than 90 companies, and should be widely
available in February, Ribbit said.

Salute America's Heroes, a veterans' association, has built essentially a call
center application that lets veterans who work for the group make and receive
phone calls while at home through a browser. The capability is integrated into
a Web site that also hosts tools they use while making the calls. The capability
allows the association to take on the cost of the calls rather than reimbursing
workers for the use of their home phones.

Ribbit designed its own softswitch, which runs on Linux blades and has been
certified in an Alcatel-Lucent lab to meet the capabilities and reliability
that telecommunications providers typically require, said Ted Griggs, CEO and
co-founder of Ribbit. Ribbit's network operations center is hosted by a third
party in Virginia, and the company is working on opening one on the West Coast
to offer geographic redundancies. It can add capacity simply by adding more
servers.

Another, more consumer-oriented application is available to try on the Ribbit
developers page. The AIR
iPhone is essentially a software-based voice over IP phone that looks just
like Apple's iPhone. Users can make and receive calls to mobile and fixed-line
phones, including from the contact list in the phone, on their computers.

Ribbit hasn't quite yet configured its offering in terms of pricing for such
consumer applications, but expects to in the first quarter of next year. In
the case of the AIR iPhone, Ribbit would share revenue from end-users with the
developer.

Ribbit says that more than 650 developers are working on new applications,
although on Friday only two were listed on the developers site. "Dozens"
are near release, a few additional applications should be available on Monday,
and many more should be available in the early months of next year, Ribbit said.

Ribbit opened its offering to developers in August but plans to officially
launch the company, along with details about how its technology and business
model work, on Monday.

IDG News Service