Archive for April, 2008

Congrats to JAJAH and Yahoo!

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 | located in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Ribbit sends big congratulations to JAJAH, our neighbors here in Mountain View, and also to Yahoo! for the announcement they shared this morning: that they will be working together to bring next generation voice to Yahoo!’s 97 million Yahoo! Messenger users.

This is a big win for both companies because it lets Yahoo! deliver voice through JAJAH’s robust global infrastructure, and because JAJAH gets the traffic and revenue associated with phone termination and use.

The larger implication, and what excites us at Ribbit most, is that this is another indication of how the business and technology of voice is rapidly morphing as phones and computers come together. We’ve all been watching the local Silicon Valley announcements—everything from Google’s Android to the Apple iPhone, and beyond. Now, this JAJAH/Yahoo! news is yet another piece of evidence that the future of voice is arriving, real time, sooner than we might have thought.

Your Innovation on the Ribbit Idea Wall

Friday, April 25th, 2008 | located in Developers, Platform, Ribbit Mobile | No Comments »

Earlier this week we launched Ribbit’s Idea Wall. On the site you can post an idea on how to use the Ribbit voice platform in ways we wouldn’t have thought possible. Included on the site are the ability to rate the best ideas, share via email, post the idea on a social network such as Delicious or Facebook, and even opt-in to build it. Ribbit’s Idea Wall is your community and we want you to show the world how to think of voice in a totally different way. As cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead once said “A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”. Post an idea today at http://ideawall.ribbit.com

Here are a couple of “Ideas” that we think are truly innovative:

“My company has a web program which handle customer database. Technical supporters check customer’s phone number on it, and then call him/her by hardware phone manually. So I have a plan to simplify this procedure. I will develop a flash VoIP client to call customers on web browser by clicking phone number. Therefore, I need the Voice Components for Flash. :-)”
http://ideawall.ribbit.com/idea/flash_voip_client

“I have a music site, where I publish my songs. I am looking for a singer and maybe this application will allow visitors of the site to sing over my instrumental tracks, so I can test the singers with my songs without having them coming personally.”
http://ideawall.ribbit.com/idea/chosing_a_singer

Tags: Developers, Flash, idea wall, innovation, Platform, Ribbit

NewsFlash: Ribbit in Action at FITC Toronto

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 | located in Conferences/Events, Ribbit Mobile | No Comments »

NewsFlash…really, we mean it. The big news at Ribbit is Flash, as in Adobe Flash, for which we announced an exciting new suite of voice components just yesterday at FITC. We’re all enjoying the below video demo in which Chuck Freedman snaps a working app together in about two minutes(!!) and calls a hotel (it’s right up there with his famed “Pizza” call at Mashup Camp…except with Flash, it was even faster to build).

The Ribbit booth was the place to be at FITC, with devs stopping by to play with the new components and build apps right on the spot. We’re loving the feedback…and we never tire of the reactions we get when people see how easy it is to bring voice to the Web with our API. Our favorite quote from FITC: “THAT’S a phone?” Well, yes. But it’s fun to rethink what a phone really is…and to see our developer community come up with all kinds of ideas that rethink “phone”…We’re inviting registered Ribbit developers to sign up for pre-release of the new Flash Voice Components. We’ll start with 50 pre-releases to developers who present the strongest cases for what they plan to build. But we’ll be rolling the components out full-force soon, so expect a wave of innovation soon.

And I leave you today with a few photos from FITC in Toronto - click here for the full set!

Dan Seyer
VP of Product Management at Ribbit

Tags: Developers, FITC, Flash, flash in the can, Platform, Ribbit

Top 10 Things to Know about Ribbit

Thursday, April 17th, 2008 | located in Developers, Ribbit Mobile, SmartSwitch | No Comments »

1. Number of tests run by Ribbit ops to ensure uptime and availability: more than 10,000 (every day).
2. Amazing thing that makes Ribbit what it really is: a proprietary Lucent-tested , Class 5 certified, industry complaint softswitch (the Ribbit SmartSwitch) that’s optimized for next-gen communications and effortless integration into telephony partner infrastructures. Whew.
3. Probability of finding a member of the Ribbit team here in the office at 3:00 am or on a weekend: 71.4% (but don’t worry. It’s because we like it here).
4. Average number of people teaming up in a Ribbit office: 4 (we’re moving soon).
5. Number of methods our API currently delivers for talking to the Ribbit service: more than 40. These include making calls, receiving calls, listening to, reading, recording, and sending voice messages, messaging contacts, all as ready-to-go scripts. Simples methods include makeCall, answerCall, playMessage, sendMessage, and addContacts. Fun!
6. Companies on our founding team’s professional pedigrees: Northern Telecom, AT&T, Cisco, MCI, NorthPoint Communications, Yahoo!, Polycom, Apple, and many more.
7. Number of strategic customer, press or partner meetings held at Ribbit in a typical week: 11. Ratio of these meetings to number of employees in our company: 1: 3.8 (it’s quite a pace).
8. Number of frog effigies currently in residence at Ribbit headquarters: 53 (and counting) (plus one very strange little dragon-like thing).
9. Things we can’t wait to get out there: Ribbit for Salesforce, Amphibian, and the Ribbit Store.
10. Why we do it. Because we believe that the world needs a new kind of phone company. And we’re here to build it for you. Thanks for staying tuned from all of us at Ribbit.

Innovation on the Ribbit Store

Friday, April 11th, 2008 | located in Ribbit Events, Ribbit Mobile | No Comments »

Yesterday, Ribbit developer Andy Powell of Universal Mind told us that his app – a mashup bringing Ribbit, Kayak, and MapQuest together to enable voip within the hotel search – had won big at 360|Flex (congrats, Andy and UM).

Seeing apps like this, and watching how a growing developer community is exploring the potential of our platform, inspired us to post about the Ribbit Store and get your thoughts on how to make it work for you.

What is the Ribbit Store? We say it’s the mechanism that lets Ribbit developers showcase applications and align with the customers who want them.

The Ribbit Store will make it easy for developers to promote, price and sell the apps and widgets they build. We say “price,” although we know that some apps will be free. We’re building the store with selling in mind because we know that many developers are thinking entrepreneurially about business opportunities on the Ribbit platform — That’s thinking we want to support.

Of course, we want development on our platform to be a profitable, motivating enterprise for our developers. That’s why we envision a rev share model that offers real potential for our developers to succeed financially through the apps they sell at our store. When we previewed our plan at the Ribbit Spawn, we received very favorable feedback (and a spontaneous round of applause), and we hope for equal enthusiasm when we share specifics later this quarter. But we’d like to hear your thoughts.

Let us know: what would make the Ribbit Store work for you? We’re listening and we look forward to the conversation.
If you want a sense of what’s possible in the store, look at Amphibian (learn more, or sign up for updates).

Thanks,

Dan Seyer
VP of Product Management at Ribbit

Ribbit in April

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 | located in Conferences/Events | 1 Comment »

Ribbit continues to hop this month, spreading the word among developers, partners and industry friends. Here’s a quick update on what we’re up to and where we’ll be over the several weeks:

• SDForum’s Emerging Technology SIG
  April 9 : East Palo Alto, California
  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.
• FITC
  April 21 : Toronto, Canada
  We’ve missed our “road warrior” Charles Freedman, Director of Development Platform, over the past few weeks (he’s been on the conference and User Group circuit, as many of you know), so it will be great to have him in the office for most of this month. His only travel plans are to Flash in the Can (FITC) where he will speak April 21st , where the theme of “breaking the rules” seems very appropriate to Ribbit.
• Dow Jones Wireless Innovations Conference
  April 22-23 : Redwood City, California
  Crick will also be speaking at the Dow Jones Wireless Innovations conference, April 22-23 in Redwood City, CA. The theme of the event—Turning Mobility into Profitability—is a great fit for Ribbit, and the “voice ware opportunity” will be at the heart of Crick’s preso.
• Web 2.0
  April 22 - 24: San Francisco, California
  Some of us will be moving around at Web 2.0 in San Francisco later this month (April 22-24) We’ll Tweet our schedules (and post them here) as we finalize dates and details. If you’re going to be there, send an email toellen (at) ribbit.com and let us know when. We may have a couple of execs in tow, so if you’re a press / blogger type and want an interview, we can probably set it up.

What about you? Places you’re going or things you’re doing that Ribbit should know about? Anything you want from us here on the blog? Let us know by adding a comment below - we’re reading and we promise to respond.

Thanks for all you do,

The team at Ribbit

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps Visits Ribbit

Monday, April 7th, 2008 | located in Visit Ribbit | No Comments »

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps recently dropped by Ribbit during his tour of Silicon Valley companies that are doing interesting things with communications. Ribbit has been getting considerable attention since we came out of stealth several months ago, but this was a delightful surprise. Mr. Copps was in the area to see “how investors and entrepreneurs are shaping the services available to consumers, and to see what “Silicon Valley’s First Phone Company” was all about. When you look at the list of people he took the time to see, you can get a sense for our enthusiasm:

• Steve Jobs - Apple
• John Doerr - Kleiner Perkins
• Larry Paige, Eric Schmidt - Google
• Larry Lessig
• …and then our own co-founders, Ted Griggs and Crick Waters

He followed up with a hand written postcard, thanking us for taking time out of our busy day to show him around.

Most gracious. Michael, thanks for coming by. You’re welcome any time.