Whasssupppp!!???

A little fun with Ribbit’s VP of Operations, Markus Hummel

Ribbit and BT’s evolving platform strategy

Voice 2.0 published a snappy article in response to BT’s shutting down of the Web 21C SDK.  I think the author did a good job of capturing both the opportunities and challenges of the programmable communications future.

Here’s a direct re-print of the article (title links) for convenience

One of the challenges facing telcos right now is to open up their network and IT assets to create more value. A common issue is how these initiatives are being driven from the IT side, who intuitively understand the importance of platforms and a developer ecosystem. Meanwhile, the rest of the business fails to comprehend the importance of external innovation, isn’t organised to sell and support it, and the technology platform struggles to have the impact on the business that was anticipated. It’s a familiar story.

In the inbox this afternoon we find a message from JP Rangaswami, BT Design’s MD Strategy & Innovation, telling us that their Web21C SDK platform is no longer going to be supported after the 10th of October. Their developer-ecosystem efforts are now concentrated on Ribbit. Web21C was always a great idea — an SDK for various programming languages that let you interact with BT’s voice switching, making, receiving, rerouting calls, sending and receiving text messages, and carrying out location dips and authentication checks.

But somehow it didn’t quite get traction; the forums over at the Web21C site are a fairly good index, there being hardly any activity. For some reason, having created the most capable telco API suite yet, BT didn’t really promote it. More recently, BT acquired Ribbit, “Silicon Valley’s Phone Company”, VoIP/Web integration specialists who aim to let Web developers build CEBP applications, which immediately raised the question of what they would do with Web21C. Now we know; it’s going to vanish.

What does Ribbit do better?

The first thing is something we’ve long since been aware of. By the very nature of a business with so many moving parts and so much that can go wrong, telcos are risk-averse and slow-moving organisations. They struggle to understand user needs, and quite simply, a lot of user demographics are too small to show up on the radar. This is why we need tools that radically cut the barriers to entry of developing new kinds of applications that embed voice & messaging capabilities. That means anyone can create their own telecoms service: either the users themselves can customise their experience (just as you do with a web portal or extensible browser); or more practically, small businesses and internal IT groups who are closer to the users.

Ribbit was a small startup that understood one particular group well — developers. We analysed no fewer than 70 new voice & messaging players in order to understand how telcos can cooperate with external innovators in order to cope with the decline of carrier voice, and we conclude that it’s precisely this kind of ecosystem they need.

The other advantage Ribbit has was underlined for us by David Sharpley, VP of product marketing channels at Oracle. As he put it, “BT essentially bought 100 developers working on Salesforce.com”. There’s a crucial strategic advantage for you — Salesforce, or rather their developer platform Force.com, gives them instant access to the enterprise, just as being a Windows shop did from the early 1990s until very recently. And CEBPs — Communications-Enabled Business Processes — are where the money is.

Ribbit is just part of the picture of what BT needs to assemble to become a viable and credible commerce platform. Ribbit, for example, is highly dependent on Adobe’s Flash technology for its user interface, just as browsers like Google’s Chrome remove the clunkiness from dynamic Web sites. We know the Web is the one unifying UI of the future, so BT has work to do to “webify” Ribbit. BT already has some of the other parts of the puzzle, such as its Tradespace e-commerce platform, and we can think of others that we’d have our M&A folk circling.

Telephony as the surprise growth engine of the future

In our Voice & Messaging report, we pointed out that what really matters is the social meaning of telephony — in a sense, there’s a shadow of metadata attached to every call and text message, strongly determining its value to the participants but hardly affecting its cost to the operator at all. As we said in the report:

The kind of research required is different to anything the industry has undertaken. It is not about statistics and user surveys, but about social anthropology. To create value, the issue that must be understood is the social meaning of telephony – not what was said or how long the call took, but what was intended by the call.

It’s in the nature of CEBPs that the bits transferred are attached to actual money. People call up freephone numbers because they want to buy stuff, not because they fancy a chat. The combination of low demands on the infrastructure and high social value means that these offer the potential for high margins. But at the same time, these kinds of interactions are valuable because they are tightly coupled to very specific problems in individual firms’ processes. You’ll never find a telco capable of spotting these opportunities. Hence the need for an external innovation strategy.

And it’s not as if telcos aren’t aware of this. Here’s a chart from the report showing the areas our fixed and converged telco respondents thought they should invest in:

Notice the big spikes for APIs and commerce. Of course, the real lesson here is that to achieve the promise of Telco 2.0, you need both those things working in close harmony; which might well be what Ribbit, Salesforce.com, and BT’s network have in store for their competitors. Web21C was nice in as far as it went — but it lacked the social and commercial elements, and so it never took off.

BT still needs to articulate to its investors a business strategy that joins together call centres, open APIs, CRM systems, and network management. These assets span across Global Services, Wholesale and Retail. If it gets this right, it could spell a revolution in how telcos make their money. We’ll be discussing these issues with JP Rangaswami and the Group CTO, Matt Bross at our event on 4-5 Nov in London.

Voice Peering and the Telephony (R)Evolution

I enjoyed being part of Tuesday’s Voice Peering Forum and joining a panel exploring Service Delivery Platforms and the intersection of Web 2.0 and telecom with an outstanding lineup of telephony innovators:

Thomas Howe (moderator), CEO of The Thomas Howe Company;
Garry Galinsky, Director, Product Innovation for Call Genie;
Shai Berger, CEO & Co-Founder, Fonolo;
Pankaj Shroff, Chief Applications Architect, Sonus Network.

Ribbit’s content on this panel garnered some great attention, including a post positioning Ribbit as “the phone company of the future” by voice peering expert Rich Tehrani. We also like moderator Thomas Howe’s comments on this video interview fresh from the Voice Peering show.

The audience at Voice Peering was as interesting as the presenters tuned in professionals representing carriers, Homeland Security, Web properties, new-age Voice 2.0 companies and more and everyone came to exchange thoughts on the whole new dynamic of interconnected voice services using this emerging peering fabric.

An “aha moment” came as I considered the visionary work that voice peering is generating, and the impact of this work on the established telephony landscape.

I associate this with natural selection. What’s happening now resembles what we see when a new species entering an ecosystem with certain inherent evolutionary advantages over the incumbent species. The species will co-exist for a while, but after a time the more efficient species, with advantages that better suit it to the environment, will become dominant.

We all felt the rumblings of this coming change on Tuesday’s panel. The technologies being deployed and relationships being formed right now will create global connectivity that transcends the legacy economic and infrastructure barriers that are a by-product of the last 60 years of telecomm history.

The way it was done is not the way it will be. It’s exciting to be part of the change and perhaps, to reference Rich Tehrani, to be a pivotal part of the phone experience of the future.

Search Me! – great rich Internet application

Ok – just when I thought I’d seen everything for search, read WebGuild’s post by Joseph Hunkins, “Will you SearchMe? [sic].” Searchme is broad search site with an entirely visual UI. It’s based on coverflow, the visual representation Apple and other use to flip album covers. Searchme.com has has raised about $44 million from firms such as Sequoia and Lehman Brothers, and DAG Ventures.

I’ve already used Searchme to find great sites about King Cobra’s for my five year old. His impression? Searchme is MUCH better than Google!

InfoWorld Salutes Ribbit as a “Rising Star”

May 19th, 2008 by Don Thorson | located in SaaS, Voice, Salesforce, Ribbit | trackback

Good news: InfoWorld honored Ribbit this morning by choosing us as one of the Hottest Tech Startups of 2008: part of an elite list highlighting “newbies whose technologies could make a huge difference to business IT.”

This recognition is especially meaningful to us given InfoWorld’s selection criteria. They award start-ups based on:

“…real technology innovation — what will drive technology forward in ways that could revolutionize some aspect of business IT…We seek at least one of three qualities: truly new technologies, innovative approaches within existing technology areas, and technologies applied in new ways to solve different problems.”

Ribbit’s founder and CEO Ted Griggs added his perspectives:
“We’re very happy to have stood out from an impressive pack of
startups, and especially from some outstanding new mobile and telephony ventures that InfoWorld considered. We’re also pleased that InfoWorld really got it right in their grasp of vertical application integration and the real convergence of voice into business workflow and productivity.

“Voice automation is a game changer—a ‘new way to solve a problem,’ ” as InfoWorld says. It’s exciting to us to see how productivity changes when voice hits Web apps, and we’re really glad that InfoWorld saw the power of this transformation.”

InfoWorld reporter Bill Snyder
dug deep to get an insightful grasp of Ribbit’s whole story—the technology, business model, and developer outlook—during the research that led up to the award. He definitely captured the vision when he said:

“Expect to see Ribbit go beyond sales force automation; integration with vertical applications in finance, real estate, medical, and others is on the way.”

Thank you, Bill, and InfoWorld. We are thrilled to be on this illustrious list.

InfoWorld Salutes Ribbit as a “Rising Star”

Samsung releases Virtual F300 Ultra Music Phone with Ribbit

For the last few months Ribbit’s been working stealthily with Cheil Communications, Samsung’s internal marketing agency, to create a really cool virtual phone. It’s a virtual F300 Ultra Music Phone.

The F300 Ultra Music phone is two-sided: one side is a phone, the other an MP3 player. Beyonce is the promotional video celebrity behind the phone.

Cheil’s new virtual F300 promotion takes a new turn and does what no other company in the world has ever done before – make a desktop version of an actual production phone AND make it work! By using Ribbit’s API, Cheil turned the F300 virtual phone into kind of soft phone, entirely powered by the Ribbit network.

There’s another technology breakthrough at work here – the phone is an Adobe AIR application. It is NOT a SIP phone. There is no complicated setup. It works on any computer and OS. AIR let Samsung re-create the phone with rich animation and graphics. Ribbit make it a phone.

It’s being promoted on YouTube and Metacafe. Here’s what Samsung says about it:

http://www.twinsbecomeone.com The task ahead is to connect the Twins through their emerald and purple eyes. Discover both sides to their powerful mobilephone technology within the Samsung ultraslim F300 – then download the widget and directly from your PC/MAC desktop make free calls, SMS, and play MP3s.

The virtual phone comes with a U.S. phone number, can make and receive calls, can send SMS messages, and can even import Plaxo contacts. You won’t find all the features you’d expect from a phone… still, it’s really pretty cool!

To get your own virtual F300 Ultra Music phone powered by Ribbit, go to www.twinsbecomeone.com and play the game by connecting the twins through their emerald and purple eyes. You’ll be rewarded with a downloadable virtual phone. If you already have a Ribbit Amphibian account (you know who you are , just log in. Otherwise, register and your virtual phone will be assigned a telephone number. You can receive calls, and make calls, just like a real phone.

Hint: to flip the phone, click the lower of the two side-buttons on the right edge of the phone.

Sprout Builder – couldn’t be easier to add Voice!

Tonight, I ran across Ryan Stewart’s article in ZDNet announcing Sprout Builder’s SDK release.

“Aside from the fact that Sprout is built in Flex, one of the most interesting things I saw about Sprout was the way it leveraged the Flash platform. It launched with a Ribbit widget that would let you make calls from your Sprout.”

I tried it tonight – incredibly, I was able to build a “Call me” widget and post it to my Facebook profile in minutes! Right now, it uses Ribbit developer account credentials (free here) to make calls – and I can set the widget to call ANY phone number.

Ribbit’s development team has pre-announced our new Flash developer toolkit. As these new drag-and-drop Flash design elements become available, I hope to see them in great sites like Sprout Builder!

A Mashup That Makes Sense

Voiceware or Voice Where?!! Ribbit-MapQuest-Kayak mash up.

read more | digg story

Ribbit for Salesforce.com – “Customer love” :-)

“”Fantastic application that adds much needed functionality to Salesforce.com. We all worry about capturing important information in emails but what about voice mail? So much business is being done on the phone and through voice messages that never makes its way into SFDC. Now it can with Ribbit. And the ability to leave a voice memo on your mobile and have it immediately available in SFDC is huge! An essential app that no SFDC implementation is complete without.”

check it out: http://www.ribbit.com/salesforce“

Ribbit presenting at SDForum – Emerging Technology SIG

SDForum invited Ribbit co-founder Crick Waters to showcase the Ribbit platform and demo new apps at its Emerging Technology SIG on April 9. This is a cool Silicon Valley gathering and we’re looking forward to meeting with other companies, the investment community, developers and interested parties.

Ribbit Blog – http://www.ribbit.com/blog