Archive for the ‘Ribbit Mobile’ Category

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

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 honored in eWeek’s “Top Web Products, Services of 2008″

Friday, December 12th, 2008 | located in Articles and Media Mentions, Awards, Platform, Ribbit Mobile | No Comments »

This has been a phenomenal year for the Ribbit community and today’s inclusion in eWeek’s “Top Web Products, Services of 2008″ just made our day.

eWeek’s annual list honors new Web products or services released in 2008 that have truly made an impact in the IT industry. The list includes some well known heavyweights like Google and Yahoo, but also startups like blist, Poweset and Ribbit whose innovations have proven to be crucial to the consumers and workers who depend on them. We couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas present:

Some of the other innovators in this category are:

• blist, an easy to create sharable web list
• Google App Engine
• Powerset, acquired by Microsoft earlier this year
• Yahoo! Developer Network
• Google Health
• Google Chrome
• Google Android
• Yahoo! YOS 1.0
• Voice and video chat for Google Gmail

A big Thank You to our developer community for helping us build a truly innovative platform. Here is to a great 2009.

Tags: Android, Awards, blist, eweek, Google, Google Chrome, Powerset, Ribbit, Services of 2008, Top Web Products, Yahoo!

Hello Again

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 | located in Conferences/Events, Platform, Ribbit Mobile | No Comments »

Ribbit 2.5 Update: Yes, we have been very quiet here at Ribbit. Mt. View offices as our Developers work to put the final touches on our new Ribbit 2.5 API which enters pre-release this week. The new release will support a host of exciting new features including Outbound SMS Messaging, Contact Caching, and Call Event Monitoring. We are really excited about the encouraging feedback we have received, especially on our roadshows where Chuck Freedman, the Director of Ribbit’s Developer Platform, has been engaging our greater developer community. If you would like to sign up for the pre-release hop on over to our sign-up page and we will reach out when new seats are available.

Conferences

Emerging Technology Conference, Sept 22- 25th, MIT Campus: Ribbit was proud to be invited to the Emerging Technology Conference on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA where we had the opportunity to exchange ideas with fellow tech innovators such as Intuit, Microsoft, Amazon and Intel, and a host of engrossed student developers. Conversations ranged from exciting partnership opportunities to ideas for integration with interesting new applications such as virtual worlds and online gaming. Our Ribbit 2.5 API was well received and we are thrilled to be recognized as a leader among the developer and innovator community.

Partnerships

Ribbit Joins Oracle’s CRM On Demand Inner Circle: Ribbit is busy building partnerships with Industry leaders. In late September, Oracle announced Ribbit’s addition to its prestigious Oracle PartnerNetwork. This enables the industry-leading Oracle(R) CRM On Demand application to add voice automation via Ribbit’s carrier-grade telephony platform. By incorporating voice into the Oracle CRM On Demand workflow, mobile workers can dramatically increase productivity and close more deals while on the go.

Ribbit Partners with Sylantro Systems: Ribbit Partners with Sylantro Systems: On Oct, 15th 2008 Ribbit announced a partnership with Sylantro to integrate the Ribbit Platform with Sylantro’s Synergy Platform and Synapps Web Services. The joint solution will enable developers to create and monetize rich, powerful, Flash-based telephony applications more quickly and easily, bringing the innovation from Ribbit’s growing developer community to Sylantro-powered service providers. At the Sylantro Global Summit in Las Vegas, Sylantro and Ribbit demonstrated this joint platform on Ribbit for Salesforce and was well received by the developer community.

Where to Catch Us Next

AJAX world, Oct 20-22nd, San Jose, CA: Chuck Freedman will be presenting at AJAX World, the largest West Coast event devoted to AJAX, Rich Internet Applications, and Enterprise Web 2.0. We will demo how easily your customers or clients can make and receive calls from your flash application without leaving the webpage or picking up the phone.

Dreamforce, Nov 2nd–5th, San Francisco, CA: The Ribbit team will be at the Dreamforce Conference on Nov 2nd–5th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Dreamforce is the largest Software-as-a-Service event, focused on generating developer, partner and customer success with Salesforce CRM applications and the Force.com platform. Our Team will be available to talk about how Ribbit for Salesforce delivers voice memos and voicemails, directly to Salesforce accounts, from any mobile phone.

To stay up-to-date with all that’s new at Ribbit including new features, Conferences and Announcements be sure to sign up on our developer page.

Tags: AJAX World, dreamforce, Emerging Technology Conference, MIT, On Demand Inner Circle, Salesforce, Sylantro

The Ripple Effect: Only the Beginning

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 | located in Platform, Ribbit Mobile | 1 Comment »

Announcing our acquisition by BT brought the expected tsunami of response, which we loved—and it also brought some more subtle and insightful responses from literally around the globe. We really liked watching people jump into the conversation about open telephony, the “talkification” of the web, and the growth of Ribbit’s platform into the international arena.

Blog posts, Twitter updates, and conversations with the media and industry partners—all gave us proof that our community really understands where this Ribbit/BT synergy is leading.

It also showed us, once again, how much value this community will add as we continue to grow.

We’re sharing just a few links below in hopes that you’ll take a look.

UK blogger Jon Moss discovered Ribbit through Twitter yesterday, and after learning about what we do, had a lot to say about Ribbit and Amphibian.

Adobe’s Ryan Stewart stopped by the office and talked with Chuck Freedman about what our news means to the Flash community. We even filmed it; watch it here.





C|Net News responded with three insightful articles; all are worth reading but you can start with Marguerite Reardon’s perspectives on open development. In one of the first commentaries on the acquisition, Mashable had strong thoughts, too.

What about you? What have you heard or thought about the Ribbit/BT partnership, and what would you like us to know? Comment here. We look forward to the conversation.

Don Thorson
VP of Marketing 

Tags: Amphibian, BT, cnet, developer platform, Developers, marguerite reardon, mashable, open development, Ribbit, Voice, voice 2.0

What’s Happening with Amphibian

Monday, June 2nd, 2008 | located in Ribbit Mobile | 1 Comment »

I’m taking a moment to look up from all of great things happening here at Ribbit—Flash Components, Salesforce integration, active development internally and with third parties—to bring the Ribbit community up to date on what’s happening with Amphibian. I’ll explain what Amphibian means to users and developers, and will try to briefly answer the question, “What is Amphibian?”

Amphibian is a service that takes everything your phone already does and makes it better by bringing new levels of phone functionality online. We all can probably agree that if the phone system were designed today, many things would be different, and more aligned with the online world. Amphibian delivers that rethink of telephony.

Amphibian delivers an online home for information that moves through your phones: your incoming and outgoing calls, your voicemails, and data related to how you use your phone.

By registering your phone into Amphibian, you can centralize phone activity, messages, and anything else you do with your phone, and decide how and where you want to manage this activity. Amphibian stores, tracks and organizes messages for you, letting you forward, search, save and work with them as text, email messages, or in other ways that you choose.

Because Amphibian is an open API, these features—to skim the surface—can be integrated into the Web environments that people use as part of their daily life. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, blog pages—really, any open Web destination becomes a place where Amphibian can live, delivering phone network functionality wherever people already spend time online.

There’s much more to say, so stay tuned. Amphibian is about to enter formal beta, and it’s exciting to see it ready to leave the pond, so to speak, and starting to walk on land. Thanks for being part of our first steps. We can’t wait to see where you help us go.

Don Thorson
VP Marketing - Ribbit
http://www.ribbit.com

Tags: Ribbit, Ribbit Mobile

Tonight’s NewTech Meetup & Visual Voicemail with Ribbit & Skyfire

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 | located in Conferences/Events, Ribbit Mobile | 1 Comment »

Tonight Ribbit is presenting in San Francisco at the NewTech Meetup, a great local showcase of cutting-edge tech innovation. It’s going to be fun. Chuck Freedman, our Director of Developer Platform, will take to the stage and—using the whole 5 minutes each presenter is allocated—use Ribbit Voice Components for Flash to drag-and-drop his way to a working application, right before the audience’s eyes.

Then he’s going to call a pizza parlor and place an order. We think the crowd will go wild.

We’ll show you what it looks like on Thursday, but in the meantime, here’s a little drag-and-drop just for you. Enjoy watching Chuck, filmed right here at Ribbit Headquarters, share some Ribbit magic on his mobile phone. Chuck, Skyfire and Ribbit equals visual voicemail!

Tags: Ribbit, Ribbit Mobile, visual voicemail

Ribbit in May

Sunday, May 4th, 2008 | located in Developers, Platform, Ribbit CRM, Ribbit Mobile | No Comments »

We’ve been waiting for May for a long time. This month we are officially rolling out a new product and we can’t wait to get Ribbit in the hands of customers to see their response. We’re holding our breath a little, but at the same time we think we know what’s going to happen and we’re very excited.

Also in May, we’ll be speaking at a whole new type of forum when we showcase Ribbit at the San Francisco New Tech Meetup a lively gathering of developers, entrepreneurs, investors and cool companies with new ideas to share. If you’re in the Bay Area on May 13, don’t miss it. Chuck Freedman and other Ribbit folks will be on hand; be sure to say hi.

Here are a few other things on the agenda:

• Telling you more about Amphibian, which we are already using here at Ribbit, and which is getting ready to move…well, out of the pond.
• Delivering the Ribbit Voice Components for Flash pre-release to 50 revved-up developers.
• Meeting with tech innovators in Silicon Valley to talk about Amphibian and hear their thoughts about development and more (let us know if you’re in the area and want to be involved).
• Seeing how close we can get to adding our 5000th developer (we added #4000 last week!).

Stay tuned!

Don Thorson

Tags: Appexchange, Ribbit, ribbit for salesforce, SaaS

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