Bits : Would You Buy a Telephone From a Company Named Ribbit?
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Ribbit, based in Mountain View, Calif., will announce a telephone Web service intended to make it possible for programmers to add telephone features to any Web page.
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The beta VoIP service is easy to set up and works well--but how long will the company be able to give away long-distance phone service?
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Business & money: Consumer group Which? calls for ban on mobile phone cashback deals
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A Romanian man&#39;s had a reply from the country&#39;s state phone company 28 years after asking them to install a phone. Gheorghe Titianu from the northern town of Suceava said he was delighted when he saw the letter. However, the letter was simply ...
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Silicon Valley start-up Ribbit Corp on  Monday unveiled a technology platform that will let developers  put Web telephony in everything from business software to  popular social network sites such as Facebook.
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Fancy a diamond-encrusted cellphone for $3.5 million, or a gold-plated, musical Swiss watch costing more than $2 million?
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Vonage tanked after its IPO. It's not entirely clear anymore why eBay paid $2.6 billion for Skype. And the long-awaited rollout of advanced TV services based on Internet technologies has resembled the drip of a faucet.
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Should investors connect with this troubled telecom?
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'Lucy' goes for the soft sell NSFW Thanks very much to reader Nick L for alerting us to a rather strange eBayer who has decided to deploy her not inconsiderable assets as a sort of mammary display stand. Try this "auction" for a Panasonic CD player front panel:â¦
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BT sets out world-domination plans Last time I wrote a piece about British Telecom I was contacted by a reader who complained that the company had been operating as BT for some time and that I was revealing my lack of industry knowledge through the use of the obsolete moniker.â¦
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These companies want to buy something -- why not themselves?
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A Mountain View, California, company is launching a platform designed to let developers create telephony applications they can embed in Web pages and existing Web-based services.Ribbit&#39;s back-end technology includes a software switch that essentially connects Internet-based voice communication services with mobile phones, landline phones and text messages. On top of that connection is the Ribbit API (application programming interface) that lets developers build applications that unify the wide variety of communication methods.Developers can build applications that include functions such as recording, sending and receiving voicemail, and making and receiving calls. The applications can be built using Flash, embedded into any Web site, and integrated into existing Web-based services. The platform supports many existing Web-based calling services, such as Skype, GoogleTalk and MSN.Developers can charge end-users for the applications, and Ribbit can handle the billing for them. There are several ways developers can offer and charge for their products, and in some cases Ribbit will share revenue with developers.Ribbit showed off one application a developer has created that embeds phone capabilities into Salesforce.com. By keying a code into a mobile phone, users essentially replace their current voicemail with Ribbit for Salesforce. Then users can listen to or see text transcripts of their mobile voicemail messages within Salesforce. They can send the messages to colleagues and tag them for easy sorting later.Users can also make and receive phone calls through their Salesforce page. Such calls are automatically logged in their Salesforce application.Ribbit for Salesforce will cost $25 per user per month for end-users. It is currently in a private beta with more than 90 companies, and should be widely available in February, Ribbit said.Salute America&#39;s Heroes, a veterans&#39; association, has built essentially a call center application that lets veterans who work for the group make and receive phone calls while at home through a browser. The capability is integrated into a Web site that also hosts tools they use while making the calls. The capability allows the association to take on the cost of the calls rather than reimbursing workers for the use of their home phones.Ribbit designed its own softswitch, which runs on Linux blades and has been certified in an Alcatel-Lucent lab to meet the capabilities and reliability that telecommunications providers typically require, said Ted Griggs, CEO and co-founder of Ribbit. Ribbit&#39;s network operations center is hosted by a third party in Virginia, and the company is working on opening one on the West Coast to offer geographic redundancies. It can add capacity simply by adding more servers.Another, more consumer-oriented application is available to try on the Ribbit developers page. The AIR iPhone is essentially a software-based voice over IP phone that looks just like Apple&#39;s iPhone. Users can make and receive calls to mobile and fixed-line phones, including from the contact list in the phone, on their computers.Ribbit hasn&#39;t quite yet configured its offering in terms of pricing for such consumer applications, but expects to in the first quarter of next year. In the case of the AIR iPhone, Ribbit would share revenue from end-users with the developer.Ribbit says that more than 650 developers are working on new applications, although on Friday only two were listed on the developers site. &quot;Dozens&quot; are near release, a few additional applications should be available on Monday, and many more should be available in the early months of next year, Ribbit said.Ribbit opened its offering to developers in August but plans to officially launch the company, along with details about how its technology and business model work, on Monday.&#160;
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Home telephone service without a monthly bill. A bookstore that delivers best sellers to an e-book reader in a jiffy. And a smartphone that all but rewrites the rules of what a cellphone should be. These were among the tech items to capture my fancy this year.
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Company says it might consider busting into pieces to revive its ailing cell phone business. But is it the right move?
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Voice 1.0 is so 20th century Silicon Valley start-up Ribbit has announced another $10m in funding, and the opening of a beta developers program for developers wanting to create telephony applications using Flash technology, for a "Voice 2.0" experience.â¦
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Wendy Seltzer asks, Which is more open: the Nokia N95 or the iPhone? Regardless of the answer, I'm wondering if there's an objective way to score openness... perhaps a kind of in-the-wild folksonomic list of deal-makers and deal-killers. Rather than bias the list, I thought I'd just put the idea out there to start with, and see what variables ya'll would like to see on the list.
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If you are in Sudan it is a "missed  call." In Ethiopia it is a "miskin" or a "pitiful" call. In  other parts of Africa it is a case of "flashing," "beeping" or  in French-speaking areas "bipage."