Available now for integration and testing for qualifying network operators and enterprise customers, VTT-sa is:

• A secure, cloud-based service that is an integral part of the award winning Ribbit platform.
• Converts voice to text for mobile and wireline voicemail systems, traditional and IP-based PBXs, and conference calling and other business critical applications.
• Can also be extended to a private cloud-based infrastructure for customers who prefer governance and control of their cloud environment.
• Ensures customers’ requirements for privacy, accuracy, language and conversion speeds can be set and adjusted on demand.
• Uses proprietary algorithms, advanced modeling and forecasting software to continuously monitor and analyze the voice-to-text performance of a qualified group of voice-to-text conversion providers and automatically selects in real-time, the one that has the highest performance and which most closely matches the requirements specified for each voice-to-text conversion

Enterprise customers working in government, finance, legal, healthcare and other sectors that routinely handle sensitive data can choose a service level that relies solely on voice recognition software and algorithms to convert voice to text. General business consumers with less stringent security requirements can choose service levels optimized for speed and accuracy.

Quote:

• Stephen Wu, general manager, Ribbit Voice-to-Text Services: “Network operators and enterprises understand the value of converting voice-to-text and making it searchable and actionable in a range of applications. With support for multiple speech recognition methods and providers, VTT-sa delivers unmatched flexibility, security, reliability and performance. Network operators and enterprises can finally have the best of both worlds – leading-edge voice-to-text application services backed by an experienced, global technology company and telephony provider.”

Available in both English and Spanish, VTT-sa supports a variety of interface options including TDM, SIP, REST APIs, SMTP, SMS/SMPP, IMS and legacy SS7. Extended interface options including advanced call completion features are also available via Ribbit/BT’s cloud-based, telco-class 4/5 infrastructure.

For more information, please visit us online.

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Built as a proof-of-concept, Ribbit for Windows 7 demonstrates how carriers can apply trends impacting the telecommunications industry to increase average revenue per user (ARPU). As a branded desktop application, Ribbit for Windows 7 brings the carrier brand to the forefront of the customer experience, and provides a revenue-generating vehicle through local advertising and international call termination. Using an opt-in model, the companies who own this data can market and advertise based on their understanding of their subscribers tastes, geographic location and social graph.

Ribbit for Windows 7 is compatible with Windows Live Contacts, and provides new ways to stay connected in a rich mobile desktop experience. It offers click-to-call/click-to-conference functionality, visual voicemail, SMS and instant messaging (IM) via an intuitive, customizable, drag and drop user interface using touch-screen features from Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

Carriers and service providers are struggling to maintain growth and relevancy in an increasingly mobile-dominated world. In fact, according to a March 2009 IBM Global CEO Survey, more than half of the telecom executives surveyed plan to open their networks to external application providers, and a third of them are considering ways to capitalize on existing customer relationships and mobile networks to help boost ARPU.

Voice as an Application Drives Increased Revenue and Decreases Subscriber Churn
As a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT, Ribbit understands how to help carriers improve subscriber productivity, sustain high value margins and reduce subscriber churn through bundled services. Ribbit’s open, cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model allows telecom companies to eliminate the tremendous cost associated with building out a network that would otherwise require 24 – 36 months to build, deploy and market.

Quotes:

• Joe Black, Ribbit VP of Strategy and Business Development: “This emerging monetization model will enable providers to deliver bundled applications and services that will yield a higher margin and reduce subscriber churn. By leveraging Ribbit’s powerful platform based APIs, providers can enter markets they were once unable to reach due to regulation of the telecom industry and the cost-prohibitive nature of building out networks.”
• Joseph Hofstader, Telecommunications Industry Architect and Evangelist, Microsoft Communications Sector: “Over the last couple of years, we’ve watched a number of trends create an environment that is now revolutionizing the communications industry – among those is voice as an application and communications networks as programming platforms. Today, network carriers have an opportunity to increase their revenues by applying the economic model of the Web to the telecommunications industry. By offering value-added communications services, they can capitalize on technological advancements. The application of the still-evolving Internet business model to a century old industry may seem contradictory to many passive observers but a closer look reveals that the main revenue drivers in both industries are remarkably similar: subscriptions, transactions and advertising—and that is where the opportunity lies.”

Ribbit for Windows 7, will be demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (taking place February 15-18, 2010) in the Microsoft booth #1D19. Ribbit is focused on helping carriers integrate rich communications into existing networks, build revenues and attract and retain customers and we feel Meridia is exactly the solution the telco industry has been looking for.

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We’ll be walking the show floor, capturing some shots of cool gadgetry, interviewing smart people, hanging out in sessions, drinking good wine with the locals and will be on hand when Crick Waters, co-founder of Ribbit, steps into a panel discussion on ‘Building the Mobile Cloud’. The panel takes place February 17th at 4:40pm and sitting on the panel with Crick will be:

• Didier Jaubert, Senior Vice President, Global Services, Orange Business Services
• Vikram Saksena, Chief Technology Officer, Tellabs
• Steve Mannel, Media & Communications Industry Director, Salesforce

We will have lots to share from Barcelona, and might just have a few more announcements coming next week.

If you have never been to Barcelona (like me), take a moment and flip through the Flickr set of MorBCN. I love experiencing cities through the eyes of the local people, and even more so when they use HDR to capture the vibrancy of their favorite spots. Love. Love. Love his work.

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So you can probably imagine why this ‘telephone sheep’ art installation from Jean-Luc Cornec from the Museum of Telecommunication in Frankfurt resonates so deeply with me. It hits home on all fronts and is ’shear’ genius I tell you. <sorry, just couldn’t help myself>

Wonder what they will do with the sheep once the exhibit is over? Thinking Ribbit needs some new artwork in our lobby.

Photos from This Blog Rules (where you will find more sheep sculptures too!).

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Corporate

• Ribbit CEO, Ted Griggs named CTO of BT Voice
• Following BT’s acquisition in July 2008, we focused our efforts on integrating into BT infrastructure
• The team is growing, so we packed up our things and moved into bigger digs.
• Launched new website at ribbit.com

Mobile

• Ribbit Mobile opens beta in the United States
• Launched private beta in the United Kingdom with BT employees and gave away a free trip to California to one lucky winner, Lucie Pepper!
• Apple approves the Ribbit Mobile iPhone app. Woot!
• App Gallery launched with  SMS, Conference, Check Messages (and more!) widgets

Platform

• REST API beta launched with new PHP, Javascript, Java SDK’s
• Announced Ribbit’s .NET Software Development Kit (SDK) and ready-to-use Microsoft Silverlight controls for communications-enabling Web pages and applications.
• Released Conference Call Gadget in Google Wave, and named a featured extension in their app gallery
• Kicked off global application challenge and saw some great submissions from Lucid Viewer, Save a Life, Sugared Frog, SimplePhone, and Control Your Home, Anywhere, Anytime (‘CYHAA’) to name a few.
• Major update to the developer web portal

CRM

• Ribbit for Salesforce 2.0 brought new SMS messaging and voice-based record creation features into Ribbit for Salesforce CRM.
• Announced the beta availability of Ribbit for Oracle, helping mobile workers to see instant productivity gains and positive returns on their CRM deployments.
  Opened Platform Beta

Look ma, we’ve Done good!

We were also nominated for a couple of awards (TechCrunch’s Crunchies, Read Write Web’s Favorite Web Product, CNET’s Webware 100) and took a couple home with us too!

• Won Salesforce Best Mobile App award for 2008
• Winner of the Innovative Web Technologies category in Microsoft’s BizSpark Accelerator at SxSW
• Named TMC 2008 Communications Solutions Product of the Year

We wish to thank every one of you for your support in all things Ribbit. 2009 was a great year and paves the path for an exciting 2010 for all of us.

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Summarizing JP, ‘our job is to show you the what is possible with the enabling technologies…your job is to do something with it’.

I like JP’s framing around telcos and how they should embrace technologies like Ribbit, VOIP, etc. He notes telcos core job is to help people connect with one another, and while there will always be some tension when new technologies surface that compete with your bottom line, telcos who are willing to embrace and add value to these technologies will not only see revenues incrase, but ensure they are doing the best job possible for their customers.

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The Read Write Team picked their favorite top 100 that includes some of ‘my’ favorite services as well (Twitter, Collecta, Evernote, Wordpress, Mint, and Tweetdeck), and will be narrowing it down to the top 10 of 2009 at the end of *this* week.

Know what I would love? I would love to see Ribbit make that top 10 list.

If you feel the Ribbit love, care to cast your vote for us? Voting is open through Friday, December 18th and you can select up to 10 products, just make sure ‘Ribbit‘ is one of them. Ha.

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“LinkedIn’s open API is perfectly matched to Ribbit’s open telephony API.  Mapping callers’ “communications” identity with LinkedIn identities allows Ribbit to bring “Caller ID 2.0” to market – bringing LinkedIn users’ updates and content right to the desktop of Ribbit Mobile users is groundbreaking – and made possible because of the ease of use of LinkedIn’s new open API.” - Crick Waters, SVP Strategy and Business Development at Ribbit

As a platform company ourselves, it will be interesting to see how developers leverage the LinkedIn platform as there seems to be a lack of good business applications available in the various app stores right now, so finding ways to access your professional (and personal) relationships with API mashups has solid potential. We would love to see developers building apps around Ribbit Mobile, and also using our API to bring communications into other applications. Interested in learning more? Click here.

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Microsoft PDC: November 17-19, 2009 in Los Angeles, CA. Join Mat Taylor, Joe Black, Wes Leonardo and Lisa Chand on the show floor in the Ribbit booth. Think they have plans to buy some drinks while there, so make sure to hit them up if you see them!

Dreamforce: November 17-20, 2009 in San Francisco, CA. We just announced the Ribbit for Salesforce 2.0 release so make sure you stop by our booth (#317) and ask the team to give you a demo of the voice to text record creation, SMS (text) messaging from the web and so much more.

• You should also catch our very own Greg Goldfarb (vice president and general manager of enterprise applications) during his “Sales 2.0: Boosting Rep Productivity with the Best New Web Technologies” session on Friday (10:15 a.m. - 11:15 a.m) in Esplanade 300.
• And our good friend (and Ribbit for Salesforce loving client), Will Stacy, will be taking the stage during Dreamforce in the “Mobile Round Table: Success Stories from the Trenches” on Thursday (2:45 pm) in Room N125.

Supernova: December 1-3, 2009 in San Francisco, CA. Join Ribbit’s Crick Waters and BT’s JP Rangaswami and Kevin Marks in three killer sessions.

• On December 2nd at 9am: JP Rangaswami, John Hagel, Umair Haque, Ellen Levy discuss Crisis? What Crisis? Strategies for a Connected World. Was the financial crisis a permanent discontinuity in market economies, or just a temporary bump in the road? Either way, can the strategies and economics of the 20th century to translate to the digitally networked world of the 21st?
• December 2nd at 3pm: Kevin Marks, Barney Pell, Caterina Fake cover Sense Making: Real Time Search, Answers, and Discovery. How can we extract actionable knowledge out of the cacophony of interactions as they happen? Is real-time search just a faster version of searching the web, or something fundamentally new?
• December 3rd at 8:30am has Doc Searls, Crick Waters, Christopher Dean, Brian Bogosian, Craig Walker dig into Telecom as Software. As the Internet model of decentralized open systems takes over communications, what will change and what will stay the same? Who will thrive and be threatened? And what new possibilities will open up?

Telco 2.0: December 9-10, 2009 in Orlando, Florida. Ribbit’s Brian Coulter, Thomas Howe from The Thomas Howe Company and Jajah’s Trevor Healy will dig into the following session:

• Voice & Messaging 2.0: Comms-Enabled Business Processes taking place on December 10th at 9:30am where they will discuss the opportunity to grow revenues from the Government/Enterprise/SME sector, creating a new ‘platform’ business model using Voice and Messaging APIs, comms-enabled business processes, value creation and money flow, and implications plus next step actions.

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Ribbit Mobile merges telephone capabilities with the internet to let YOU choose when and how you want to communicate. Now you can stay in touch in more ways, in more places, without restrictions - all without changing phones, phone numbers, or phone carriers.

Want to know more? Check out the new website, our Ribbit Mobile new blog, and chat with us on Twitter. And more importantly, be sure to sign up to get your free account now!

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