Ribbit: the Silicon Valley 'Voice 2.0' answer to the telephone

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 18 December 2007 13:45

Opinion and Analysis

Billed as the first ‘Silicon Valley’ telephone company, Ribbit wants to revolutionise the telephony industry, opening up telecommunications in a way that traditional telcos have resisted for decades, while also challenging the likes of Skype.

Phones are computers, and computers are phones in today’s modern world, but delivering a unified communications experience that takes full advantage of the Internet-enabled world we live in is something that no-one has really been able to achieve.

Ribbit plans to change all of this, and upgrade our voice experience to ‘Voice 2.0’ by creating an open telecommunications platform that is the reverse of the closed telephone networks still embraced by most telcos worldwide.

Ribbit says that consumers or end-users will “reap the benefits of a huge variety of interesting and useful communication applications that emerge from the efforts of our developers. In the end consumers will be able to access any information, from any connected device, regardless of the network or the protocol. Communication becomes seamless, wherever you are and whatever you're doing”.

For business, Ribbit says they will immediately see “productivity gains from voice integration. When things like messages are transcribed to text, they can be filed, tagged, searched and shared like any other piece of vital company information. Voicemails start to be treated more like emails as they become legacy data that can be stored for future reference. Voice, while the richest communication medium we have, has been neglected as a workflow component”.

An example of this for business is Ribbit integrating their telephony service into SalesForce, allowing users to receive calls and have them automatically transcribed, allowing messages to be searched as text and played back at any time, amonst other features, demonstrating the app at the 2007 SalesForce conference in San Francisco, honoured as a ‘Breakthrough App of the Year’.

Instead of being fearful of new innovations, Ribbit wants to capitalise upon the open, cross platform, multi-protocol nature of today’s world of communications, allowing phone calls to be made to and from websites, desktop Flash widgets, actual telephones and even IM programs such as Skype and others, all through an advanced ‘soft-switch’ that can handle the sophisticated communications complexities of today.

Should Skype's owners be worried? Please read onto page 2 to continue...