Don Thorson - Marketing 2.0

A Big Week At Ribbit

It's been an amazing week at Ribbit. We launched the company on Monday and we've enjoyed surprise after surprise all week long. The press coverage was exceptional. Depth, accuracy, intelligent reporting. People  (bloggers / reporters) dedicated time to their writing and painted an accurate and complete story.

This is contrasted with other launches I've done where the  journalists sometimes cut, paste and reassemble other writers articles and claim it as their own. The journalist on the Ribbit launch spent considerable time interviewing us and digging deep into the  details. For a more complete list of  news coverage you can go to the Ribbit Press Page. (We apologize to the people who covered us who are not listed on the press page. So much went on this week that we were just in a scramble. We simply ran out of time to gather the posts).

Much to our surprise, we also ended up getting television and radio coverage, again where the journalist worked hard to get the story right.

This launch was not "designed" to be a consumer oriented story - it was actually focused on creating industry and developer awareness for Ribbit and the Ribbit API.  We expect the Ribbit business model to behave as a platform , as such it needs both developers to create applications and users to create marketplace "pull". This leg of the marketing was more focused on increasing the number of developers - and it was successful in that we tripled the size of the development community in one week, from around 650 to over 2,000.

In short, we are very grateful for the coverage we're getting. It's critical for a start-up to get coverage and exposure. Being a start-up, we can't buy the awareness we need, so we hope for  the journalist and bloggers to carry the story - which they did, so Thank You everyone who wrote about us, It's very much appreciated.

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).