Here We Go Again

It's again been forever since I've put anything up. I've been posting for the companies I've been working for and neglecting my own blog. (I know, excuses, excuses). So here goes. I left Jajah Friday,September 14th and started at Ribbit, Monday, September 17. (That's a two day vacation).

How it happened that I took a new job: I was asked by some VC friends to swing by to listen to a pitch and give my input. Since I had just spent 15 months at Jajah, I knew something about the "Voice 2.0" space.  I immediately loved what Ribbit showed me.

What is Ribbit? Ribbit is essentially an "open platform for telephony innovation". Basically what we've done is create a carrier grade, multi-protocol soft-switch and then opened it up to non-telephony developers, so Flash/Flex developers can put a phone into a web site, community or application. But it's not just any phone  - its a really smart phone that knows how to move the call between previously disconnected voice protocols.

This is a lot of fancy words - what it means is, in the near future, developers by the thousands will be creating the next generation of communication products. And we don't even know what they're going to create. The really great thing about an open platform is that the rate of creativity goes off the scale.

For example, here is a  new type of phone created by a company in London called Square  Circle. It looks something like a phone, but  since the user interface was created in Flash, it does all kinds of cool animations in the process of making calls, getting your messages, etc

Which you can see some of by watching the video. The big deal is that using the Ribbit API, a non - telephony programmer can now create a real working phone, that lets you do everything your phone can do, plus things your phone can't do. Since Ribbit phones are "hard-wired" to your computer, they can take on levels of intelligence a regular phone can't. Ribbit phones are capable of treating voice as a "data object", so now you can do things like store and search voice mail messages as you would an email or a document.

I'll obviously be writing more about Ribbit. We just took the covers off the company Monday to some exceptional press coverage for a company this size. It turns out everybody is waiting for something to come along to breath some life back into voice communications / telephony space. It boggles the mind to think how quickly the Internet has changed the way we all communicate, while at the same time nothing truly innovative has happened around voice.

Ribbit's out to change that. There's a lot of information about Ribbit on the website. Best bet is to cruise the site and then go to the Press Kit section where you can download materials (Press ppt, About Ribbit, FAQ's).

 

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