This morning Ribbit launches. Billing themselves as Silicon Valley's Phone Company, they're about to launch a true Voice 2.0 phone service.
In a nutshell, they have:
- Built a carrier grade switching infrastructure for managing voice traffic.
- Added all of the other communications modalities you might us in your daily life as additional networks — that's IM, VoIM, etc.
- Built a suite of services that a developer might need in order to take advantage of this platform, including billing, directory, media and call control.
- Exposed these services through APIs ranging from web services to flash and SIP.
What can you do with this? The mind fairly boggles. For example, Ribbit makes transcriptions of voice mails as it stores them. Now you can search your voice mail box using terms like "dinner", or "ACME meeting", and Ribbit will find the voice mails that match.
Ribbit's go to market strategy is smart too. Beginning with the highly popular SalesForce.com, they've built a natural integration of voice with CRM. But they've also recruited over 600 third party developers to build applications on the Ribbit platform as well in order to allow them to take advantage of the long tail in communications applications.
The most clever part of Ribbit's model, however, is billing. By relieving the developer of the need to build and manage billing systems, and by presenting a single unified bill to the user, they have made it easy to build more services for Ribbit, and natural to buy more services from Ribbit.
Smart business model, aggressive and well executed go-to-market strategy, and providing real solutions to developers. Hmmm… could Ribbit be the company that finally is the disruptor that shakes up the entire telecom ecosystem – the first true Voice 2.0 carrier?
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
