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Silicon Valley Startup Wants to Take On the Telcos
Ribbit takes on telecom companies, allowing flexibility for 3rd party apps.
Dec. 17, 2007 — -- The telecommunications industry has always known that there are tons of revenue in voice communication. Now, after years of sitting on the sidelines and being frustrated by the telcos' slow pace of innovation, Silicon Valley wants a taste.
Ribbit, a startup comprised of telco veterans, web experts and software developers, wants to be a global phone company. The plan? Attract tinkerers with a highly customizable phone network that works with all kinds of devices and applications; wait for independent developers to come up with the killer app; then sit back and watch the customers roll in.
Like the big telcos, Ribbit employs networking equipment called switches to hand off calls made from its users to the rest of the telephony world. However, all similarity to the big telcos stops there. Ribbit is employing its own customized switches, which are designed to broker calls between a number of different devices, not just phones.
Users of the service can make calls to and from landlines, mobile phones, internet telephony software running on their PCs, desktop widgets, social networking applications, Flash-based phones and even web browsers.
Rather than create a dominant interface for all these potential access points, Ribbit has turned the keys over to more than 600 third-party developers, creating a developer site that offers help on linking applications and devices to the Ribbit network. It's a move that's proving remarkably popular lately, with startup efforts such as the Google-backed Android as well as established telcos like Verizon Wireless all offering "open" platforms to programmers. But few companies have given them as much latitude as Ribbit promises.
"We want developers to be able to use telephony to make money," says Ted Griggs, the CEO of Ribbit. "There's no door closed on this API for them. They have access to the guts of everything."
For developers this means a lot of flexibility. Projects like Flash versions of the iPhone designed for the desktop are already up and running. More pragmatic products like Ribbit's speech-to-text application for Salesforce are already starting to pop up, too. In short, with the right tools at their disposal, developers can create any number of mashups incorporating telephony features.
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