Archive for March, 2009

Ribbit Named Finalist in Webware 100

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 | located in Awards, Contests | No Comments »

Today the fine folks over at CNET Webware.com announced the 300 finalists (out of 5,000 submissions) for the Webware 100 contest, and opened voting today.

We are honored to receive this nod and sit happily among many of our well known and respected friends in the Infrastructure & Storage category, slotted for services that underpin Web sites or store our raw data, and tools for developers.

The polls will remain open through April 30th and all the winners will be announced on May 19th so you know what I am going to ask you to do now…show your love and cast your vote for Ribbit.

There are some great things happening within and around the Ribbit platform that we are very proud of; we have an amazing community of developers building some really innovative applications on our platform, Ribbit for Salesforce is launching in the UK on April 7th and our consumer product (’Ribbit for Mobile’) is moving from beta to public launch this Summer.

Winning the Webware’s Infrastructure & Storage category for 2009 would be icing on the cake. 

Tags: cnet, contest, developer platform, Developers, infrastructure, Ribbit, webware, webware100, webware2009

Ribbit Sparks Global Commuication Innovation with Killer App Challenge

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 | located in Contests, Platform, Ribbit Mobile | Comments Off

Winners Demonstrate Innovation, Creativity in Key Business and Consumer Voiceware Categories

Today we announced the winning voiceware applications in our $100,000 Killer App Challenge that offered developers around the world the chance to create the next leading edge applications on the Ribbit open communications platform for integrating voice communications into applications, web sites, and communities.

Unlike platforms such as Apple or Google, applications built on Ribbit are not confined to a “walled garden” - a single carrier, device or operating system – and can bridge the mobile/web experience for consumer and enterprise use. Through the Ribbit-BT partnership, developers gain unprecedented access to a global telecom infrastructure, and can quickly and easily build new voiceware applications, without being locked to a specific carrier, network or device – an industry first.

Nearly 500 developers from over 30 countries participated in the Killer App Challenge. Selected from nearly 150 applications, the winners of the Ribbit Killer App Challenge are:

Lucid Viewer (Grand Prize winner) – Media, Advertising & Entertainment Category: Lucid Viewer (photo above) is an authoring tool designed to empower artists and entrepreneurs with the ability to explore and create immersive experiences, and creating a new level of engagement between consumers and businesses. Lucid Viewer is royalty free and requires only a one-time license fee. For more information, please visit http://killerappchallenge.ribbit.com/news/?page_id=576/

Save a Life – Social Networking & Communication Category: Save a Life creates contact-on-demand access to an entire social networking community. With Save a Life, a community member with an urgent need to reach the entire membership or a segment of the community by phone can eliminate the need to look up phone numbers. Mashing up Ribbit, Yahoo Maps, and Google Calendar, Save a Life can be used for such applications as an emergency donation campaign or an emergency dispatch service. For information on Save a Life, please visit http://killerappchallenge.ribbit.com/news/?page_id=712

Sugared Frog – Business & Productivity Category: Sugared Frog integrates Ribbit with SugarCRM to integrate voice into the SugarCRM workflow. With Sugared Frog, salespeople can dictate notes and memos using their mobile phones and have them automatically flow into SugarCRM and their email inboxes. They can store and organize voicemail as email in SugarCRM, with messages mapped to leads, contacts, and in-progress deals. And all voice messages are delivered as SMS or email so salespeople can respond or forward immediately without dialing into voicemail. To view the demo, please go to http://killerappchallenge.ribbit.com/news/?page_id=899 and use the Sugar login ‘jim’ with the password ‘jim’.

SimplePhone – Carrier, Network, or ISP Integration Category: SimplePhone is a desktop-based Adobe Air phone application that allows callers to place voice calls using a computer microphone. It integrates with the Broadsoft Xtended platform and in partnership with SimpleSignal to configure various services. You may get a closer look at SimplePhone by visiting http://killerappchallenge.ribbit.com/news/?page_id=868

Control Your Home, Anywhere, Anytime (‘CYHAA’) – Breakthrough Category: Currently still a prototype, Control Your Home, Anywhere, Anytime, will allow users to “phone home” to access and control thermostats, appliances, security systems and more through voice commands. It will create a foundation for other voice-controlled applications for both consumers and enterprises. For more information on CYHAA, please visit http://killerappchallenge.ribbit.com/news/?page_id=571

Ribbit developers retain full ownership of their applications, including those participating in the Killer App Challenge. Although non-winning, many of the submitted applications demonstrated key business and consumer values, and are expected to come market in the near future with support from Ribbit.

The Ribbit communications platform – a carrier-grade telephony-plus-software infrastructure with a global community of 12,000-plus application developers – is enabling people and businesses to completely rethink the way they communicate. By treating voice as a data object, Ribbit lets developers add feature-rich voice capabilities to any application, on any device – capabilities such as updating records by phone, integrating voice and messages into a single workflow, and initiating many automated processes via voice command. For more information on becoming a Ribbit developer, visit the Ribbit Developer Community at developer.ribbit.com.

Quotes:

• Jason Villmer, creator of Killer App Challenge grand prize-winning application, Lucid Viewer: “Working with the Ribbit platform, and integrating voice into Lucid Viewer was really a very straightforward process, and it was accomplished in a very short timeframe when you consider what it’s capable of. With Ribbit, I finally have a bridge between the virtual and real worlds. The marrying of the Ribbit and Lucid Platforms will change the way people think, create and communicate.”
• Romin K. Irani, creator of Save a Life: “Life-saving blood donations and supplies are a complicated issue. Winning the Ribbit Killer App Challenge will allow me to further develop Save a Life — pairing the “need” location with the communication and life-saving supply-side efforts of numerous dislocated agencies — initially in India, where we know the key organizations, and then globally. The Ribbit platform not only helps streamline the supply and dynamic notification processes, but empowers individuals to more easily get involved in making these life-saving interactions.”
• Chuck Freedman, Director of Developer Platform at Ribbit: “With a developer community over 12,000 strong, so many of the amazing applications built using Ribbit’s rich communications service remain un-exposed to the public. The Killer App Challenge hasn’t just exposed what’s actually built on the platform, but showcases the incredible talent of many developers in our community. Our goal has always been to put out an innovative platform which allows developers to enhance their applications with Ribbit in the most logical and efficient way,” said Freedman. “Hearing that the winning developers were up and running, and in some cases, fully integrated with Ribbit in under 20 minutes, really validates what we set out to do. We’ll take great pride seeing these applications deployed by the winning developers as revenue generating and community improving applications.”
• Raymond Lee, Director of Strategy and Business Development for Ribbit: “Ribbit is drawing elite developers from around the world who understand they can now quickly enhance applications and optimize business processes with rich, integrated communication features. By directly integrating voice and communication, developers are now able to bring new levels of innovation, efficiency and value to their customers. We couldn’t be more pleased by the range of creative applications our developer community has presented.”

Please visit the Killer App Challenge page where you will find screenshots and other bits of interesting data on both the developer and the winning application.

Congrats to all our winners and thank you to everyone who participated in the challenge. We saw some really creative and innovative applications, and know this is only the beginning based on what we have coming down the pipeline next.  <end shameless teaser>

Tags: API, contest, contest winners, development, Killer App Challenge, open API, Ribbit, Ribbit API

Vegas. Baby.

Monday, March 30th, 2009 | located in Conferences/Events, Telephony | No Comments »

Ribbit’s Brian Coulter, Alain Mowad and David Markowitz are packing their bags full of water bottles (very important to stay hydrated) and heading Vegas for a couple of days (April 1-3, 2009) as CTIA and other wireless loving folks roll into that overly lit town.

They will all be roaming the CTIA hallways in between meetings, and if you really want to make sure you see Brian while there, your chances will be greatly improved if you head on over to the DIDX Dinner Party at Gordon Biersch on Wednesday night (just make sure you RSVP to save yourself a seat!).

And rumor has it all three will be at the Wipjam event on Thursday, April 2nd so pop over to that give them all a squeeze.

Remember fellas…water is your friend. Don’t forget to drink some while you are there.

Tags: ctia, ctia2009, las vegas, Ribbit, telco, wireless

Ribbit Rocks at SXSW Interactive Festival

Friday, March 20th, 2009 | located in Awards, Conferences/Events, Platform, Ribbit CRM | No Comments »

I am very proud to announce Ribbit took top honors in the Innovative Web Technologies category in Microsoft’s BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, beating out over 200 company entries. The Accelerator event highlighted the web’s most exciting new innovations through demonstrations in front of a live audience of industry professionals and technology trendsetters.

Ray Lee, Director of Strategy and Business Development for Ribbit, discussed the innovation of Ribbit’s Communication Platform which opens the previously walled off telephony industry to developers worldwide — enabling new forms of innovation, communications, and services.  The judges were pleased and at the end of the day, gave us a nice little glass trophy to take home to our boss.

Ray, beaming with pride, shared this little nugget:

“Winning the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator is a great validation of Ribbit’s platform strategy. The judges really responded to the fact that innovative, high-value applications are being built using Ribbit’s voice and data integration capabilities. And, by highlighting the success of our Ribbit for Salesforce application, we were able to demonstrate a proven business model for enabling our 12,000+ developer community, and carrier partners to innovate and deploy on the Ribbit platform.”

The Ribbit Communications Platform also got rave reviews during the panel discussion “What Does Awesome Sound Like?,” on the impact of voice integration on user interaction, led by Chuck Freedman and Brendan Lee of Ribbit. A highlight of the panel was a demonstration by Ryan Stewart, Adobe Platform Evangelist, showing the first augmented reality telephone call – showcasing the flexibility and power of Ribbit functionality. We shot some video from this session and will be posting online in the next couple of days.

Douglas MacMillan from BusinessWeek had this to say when he wrote up a little piece on Ribbit:

“The tool can be used to dial up a land line or mobile phone, much like VOIP services like Skype. But unlike Skype, it can be molded to perform neat little tricks like transcribing phone calls and instantly analyzing what’s being said. One of Ribbit’s most popular third-party developers is Salesforce.com, which now lets workers dial up clients straight from the web-based CRM software.”

Doug also captured Ray and Chuck in this little video interview:

Ribbit from Doug MacMillan on Vimeo.

We shot some photos while there, and I was able to do a few video interviews as well that will be posted over the next couple of days (thinking I need to hone my video editing skills as it takes me way too long to do this).

Chuck also shared some some tid bits on his panel, some folks he met and talked about our ‘Your Call’ initiative over on the Developer blog, which round out our week there nicely.  It was a good time for the Ribbit team and I am expecting a few more of those in the near future.

Tags: innovative web techology award, Ribbit, sxsw, sxswi, sxswspark

Ribbit and Best Buy Debut First Social Mobile App at SxSW

Friday, March 13th, 2009 | located in Partners, Platform | 1 Comment »

I am a fan of beating our own drum now and then, and the release of the Consumers Price application seems like the perfect opportunity to do so.

A Ribbit developer created the application that represents an exciting new category of retail solutions: social mobile commerce. Built using the Ribbit Communications Platform and the Best Buy Remix API, Consumers Price enables consumers to tap into social conversations to get the best prices on the best products at Best Buy, and is the first voice-enabled big-box retailer social shopping experience.

The application integrates key Ribbit communication capabilities with Best Buy’s comprehensive online product pricing and availability data, as well as social tools including Google Maps, Twitter and Flickr. Consumers can save money by setting a target price for a product and receiving SMS or email updates when a product is available and in stock at a local store. Shoppers can use the integrated social conversation capabilities to create and obtain friend recommendations via SMS, email and Twitter, and create and listen to voice reviews of the products. For products such as cameras, users can even view Flickr photos shot by a specific camera model.

Whether they are shopping for a gaming console or a new camera, consumers can access voice reviews and friend recommendations, check store availability, set the price they are willing to pay, receive SMS updates when the product is locally available at the target price, and complete their purchase.

We will be demonstrating the Consumers Price application in the Circus Mashimus Mashery Lounge at this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, March 14-17 (meeting room 2 on the first floor of the Austin Convention Center). Come on by and check it out live.

Quotes:

• Chuck Freedman, Ribbit’s director of developer platform - “Consumers Price demonstrates the ability of Ribbit to let developers generate revenue by quickly building a robust application and creating a viable business using just a few easily accessible APIs.  Consumers Price was built by combining Ribbit with APIs from Best Buy, Google Maps, Twitter and Flickr, but the possibilities for developers are endless.”
• Dan Seyer, vice president of product management for Ribbit - “Just as Priceline changed the travel industry, social mobile commerce is set to change the way consumers and retailers communicate, interact, and even negotiate. Consumers Price is just one example of the power of Ribbit to transform the retail experience, providing consumers with more options for finding the product they want at the best possible price, offering communities the opportunity to influence product inventories and pricing, and giving retailers such as Best Buy an important new way to engage consumers and move product in a down economy.”

And thank you to Kristin Niciole for the nice writeup on the announcement as well.

Exciting times ahead for sure as this is just the beginning of the cool things we’ve got up our sleeve.

Tags: API, best buy, Ribbit, social mobile commerce

Drive Financial saves valuable time AND money using Ribbit for Salesforce

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 | located in Ribbit CRM, Success Stories | No Comments »

We are a lucky crew as we were able to capture Will Stacy, Director of Marketing from Drive Financial – and a Ribbit customer - giving a great presentation last week from the Sales 2.0 stage about the productivity gains his sales team has realized from using the Ribbit for Salesforce solution.

Also want to give a shout out to Brett Queener, SVP Applications for Salesforce.com who gave a nod to Ribbit in his keynote presentation on Thursday morning. Thanks Brett!

Tags: crm, drive financial, mobile, Ribbit, ribbit for salesforce, sales 2.0, sales2.0, will stacy

Ribbit is going back to school. Sort of.

Friday, March 6th, 2009 | located in Conferences/Events, Ribbit Mobile | No Comments »

I love the diversity of the Ribbit product line and the various ‘channels’ we get to play in - CRM, Mobile, Telco and ‘Internal’ plays as it surely keeps things interesting here.

It is also great to see the various verticals we extend our services to, and one especially that peeks my interest is the Education sector. I have spent a large chunk of my life, in my various roles, helping ‘educate’ folks in some form or another and believe there is a huge opportunity for Ribbit to do some good within Universities and schools around the world. Seems no better place to dip our toes in than at the upcoming ACUTA conference taking place on April 19-21 in Atlanta, Georgia.

We will showcase our private beta version of Ribbit for Mobile, a service that transforms any physical phone into a physical/virtual “dual world” phone, enabling consumers to use their current phone plans in any number of new and evolving Web environments, live at the event, in booth #217.

Educational institutions are using the secure Ribbit platform to quickly build communication-enabled applications that are purpose-built to address their students’ and faculties’ needs. From academic, workflow and business processes, to coordinated on- and off-campus communications, Ribbit empowers educational institutions to communication-enable and enhance every facet of their operations.

Words of wisdom from our Director of Business Development, Alain Mowad:

• “The Ribbit platform gives educational institutions the power to create customized, robust, and secure applications to fit their needs quickly and cost-effectively. And, it’s exciting to show the education industry how Ribbit for Mobile can easily integrate into their communications and increase function and productivity, in both academic and business environments.”

Using Ribbit’s Programmable Communications Platform, communication features and functions are universally accessible through a multiplicity of common programming languages, over both public and private IP data networks. Ribbit bridges the traditional world of telephony with the emerging world of Web-based and mobile communications allowing widgets, applets, applications and workflows to be quickly prototyped, tested, deployed and shared.

More good things to know about Ribbit for Mobile:

• Ribbit has addressed both the underlying network and platform issues that until now have held back widespread deployment of rich media communications systems. The Ribbit platform resides outside of the institution’s facilities making available, from the Internet, all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering communication enabled applications and services.
• Ribbit’s platform is highly secure and follows strict guidelines around privacy and security of data, allowing educational institutions to comply with privacy and security regulations. It requires no software downloads or installation for developers, IT managers or end-users.

Alain will be chained to the booth (#217) during the show, so make sure you stop by and say hello.

Tags: acuta, Conferences/Events, education, mobile, Ribbit, ribbit for mobile, voice to text, workflow, workflow apps

Ribbit heads to eComm and Sales 2.0

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 | located in Conferences/Events, Public Speaking | No Comments »

I think we shall just call the month of March, “conference month”, as it seems there is something going on every week, which is a good thing I guess, as it means more chances for you to meet the Ribbit crew!

The team is fully rested from last week’s TechCrunch event, and now head to:

eComm 2009: March 3-5, 2009 in Burlingame, CA
Crick, Martin and Wes will be leading sessions (info below) and you will find several Ribbert[ers] roaming the halls over the three day conference.

• Ribbit API for the Flash Platform, led by Wes Leonardo (Sr. Flash Platform Engineer, Ribbit) on Tuesday, March 3rd from 7:30 - 8:30 PM in Salon H - Join Ribbit Sr. Developer Platform specialist Wes Leonardo as he shows you the nuts and bolts of the Ribbit API for the Flash Platform. See how easy it is to make phone calls, check voicemail and send SMS messages straight from your web application. Ribbit makes adding these voice-over-the-web solutions easy to implement with a very easy to understand API. If you want to add the latest web technology to your applications, you’ll need to check out this session.
• Where’s the money in Voice 2.0? led by Martin Geddes (Head of Strategy, BT) on Thursday, March 5th from 4:00 - 4:15 PM in Salon E - In the Voice 1.0 world — a trillion dollar business — the revenues came from selling minutes and calling features. In future, a very different business model will drive growth. Value increasingly comes from managing interactions between businesses and consumers — getting the right people together on the right medium at the right time; and from transactions during those interactions. Martin shares some of the latest research and ideas on how this will happen.
• TeleDarwinism led by Crick Waters (Co-founder, SVP Strategy and Business Development, Ribbit) on Thursday, March 5th from 4:15 - 4:30 PM in Salon E -”Transmutation” through “survival of the fittest” or “genetic migration?”  Will the convergence of programmable telephony and Internet communications change the evolutionary mechanism of this two trillion dollar industry?  Telecommunications is not the first industry to face disruptive technology shifts that destabilize and threaten incumbent business models. Far from it. A number of industries have experienced and survived tumultuous disruptions even more profound than those facing today’s incumbent carriers. Through these episodes there are companies that have survived and those that have succumbed. Best practices and successful strategies used by the leading incumbents in those industries serve to illustrate how carriers can successfully respond to today’s changing landscape. To commemorate Darwin’s 200th birthday, Feb 12 2009, let’s consider an Origin of Species lens to look at how industries might adapt to survive environmental change. Can the concept of Natural Selection be reasonably applied to technology innovation?

Sales 2.0: March 4-5, 2009 in San Francisco, CA
One of our customers, Will Stacy (Director of Marketing, Santander Consumer USA Inc.) will be speaking here and I am told…plans to say a few nice things about us. Ha.

• Accelerating Productivity – New Sales 2.0 Tools on March 5th at 10:30am - Fasten your seatbelt. Three sales experts share their experience with adopting new Sales 2.0 tools that have dramatically accelerated their sales results. Learn about innovative solutions in mobile technology, e-signatures, online appointment setting, online collaboration and more. Each presenter will join a panel discussion designed to set priorities for implementing sales acceleration tools.

Next week, several of us pack our bags and head to Austin, TX for SxSWi. Our own Chuck Freedman has a nice little roundup of what we plan to get our hands in while there (Circus Mashimus, Chuck’s panel on the 16th) AND we will be announcing a fun little contest we have planed for the SxSWers as well, so stay tuned.

Tags: Conferences/Events, Crick Waters, ecomm, Events, Ribbit, sales 2.0, sales2.0, sxsw, wes leonardo

Event Roundup: TechCrunch’s Whose Cloud Is It Anyway

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 | located in Conferences/Events, Ribbit CRM | 1 Comment »

Last Friday, the Ribbit crew gathered at the TechCrunch Whose Cloud Is It Anyway (Ribbit was also a sponsor) to hear some key visionaries such as Marc Benioff (CEO, Salesforce.com), Vic Gundotra (VP Engineering, Google) and Werner Vogels (CTO, Amazon) discuss emerging applications in the cloud and the provide insight on the cloud computing infrastructure of the future.

Our friends over at Ooyala captured the event and also got a little face time with our own Greg Goldfarb (scroll down to the 17th video) who shares some nuggets on what Ribbit has been up to on the CRM side o four house:

We took a handful of photos while there and the complete set can be seen on Flickr.

Tags: cloud computing, cloudcomputing, Ribbit, ribbit for salesforce, ribbitforsalesforce, techcrunch