Ribbit Pulls Back the Covers On Its Voice 2.0 Master Plan (And Raises $10 Million B Round)
Erick Schonfeld
34 comments »
In case it isn’t abundantly clear by now, voice is just another application—bits that can be co-mingled with other data in unexpected ways. Ribbit, a startup that officially launches today and calls itself “Silicon Valley’s first phone company,” takes that concept as its basic premise. It wants to be the platform company for Voice 2.0 applications. If its plans succeed, there will be thousands of new phone apps appearing soon, and they almost all will be Flash apps. In other words, these won’t be stand-alone pieces of software like Skype. They will let people make calls right from the browser and tie deeply into other apps and data on the Web.
“If you were to invent a phone company today,” asks CEO Ted Griggs, “what would it look like?” It wouldn’t be just cheap calls over the Web or a one-trick startup built around a single feature like click-to-call buttons. No, says Griggs, who founded Junction, a VoIP software company he merged with Summa Four and sold to Cisco in the late 1990s. It would be a complete end-to-end environment where developers who know nothing about telephony could plug into and quickly create Web-based phone applications. Ribbit recently closed a $10 million B round led by Allegis Capital, with KPG Ventures participating. The company also raised $3 million (the amount was previously undisclosed) from Alsop Louie Partners in October, 2006.
Today’s launch is a developer launch, not a consumer launch (that will come later in the first quarter of 2008). It is releasing a more robust version of its APIs for its private developer beta, which is open to any programmer. Already, about 600 developers have built Ribbit apps under certain restrictions (they are not allowed to go live on the Web until early next year). These apps range from an Adobe AIR iPhone that can make calls from your computer to a Flash phone with a chalkboard interface to a browser-based phone that works inside Salesforce.com (see screen shot below).
All of these phones can call other Web-based phones (including Skype), VoIP phones, or regular landline and mobile phones. Ribbit handles the calls and other voice-related services (call logs, voice messages, speech-to-text transcription,contact imports, directories, provisioning, billing, security, authentication) and provides the APIs to developers, who build their apps with Adobe’s Flex development tools. (Ribbit does not support Ajax apps because Ajax does not let you access the computer’s microphone, says Griggs, but he might consider extending support to Silverlight, which does). Ribbit will create its own consumer and enterprise phone apps, but it will also host a marketplace where consumers and businesses can find (and buy) Ribbit apps.
For the most part, Ribbit plans on charging for its calls. “There is a company a week that tries to avoid paying for the call. We are not doing that,” says Crick Waters, senior vice president of strategy. It is free to play with the API’s and develop a Ribbit phone application, but once it goes into production and actual calls begin, Ribbit will start charging. Pricing will start at $30 a month for 20 simultaneous sessions, or seats (for, say, call center reps logged into the application making and receiving calls), plus per-minute fees to the regular phone network. (Internet calls are free). The developer can then choose to charge its customers or provide it for free, and make up the cost in other ways. There probably will be free consumer apps from both Ribbit and its developers, but the business opportunity here is for enterprise voice applications that can be charged for. Instead of developing a custom call-center application for $250,000, for instance, an entrepreneur could build the same thing for much less on Ribbit and charge, say, $5 a month per customer service rep (with Ribbit taking $1.50).
At its core, Ribbit has built a telephone switch in software, known as a soft switch. It works just like a switch made by Lucent or Nortel. Except that it is software running on hosted Linux servers. Ribbit’s “class 5″ switch has been tested in Lucent’s labs and passed with flying colors—meaning it is as reliable as any telco switch, Griggs assures me. Ribbit’s soft switch can send calls to regular phones, mobiles, Voice-over-IP, Voice-over-IM, and Web pages. It supports many voice protocols (SIP, Skype, Google Talk’s XMPP). Through its APIs, Ribbit will give developers access to all the functionality of its phone switch. “In the old days,” says Griggs, “it was a hardware box Lucent built talking to a hardware box that Nortel built. Today, there are a lot of clients people are using.” Want to create a unified messaging service that follows you wherever you are, even ringing on your IM or in your browser? No problem.
Sending phone calls over the Web is not what makes Ribbit interesting, though. What makes it interesting is that it offers a way to create voice apps in a familiar Web application development environment that can easily be linked to other Web apps. Voice is just a feature of the Web, and Ribbit recognizes that. The Ribbit phone created as a demo for Salesforce.com, for instance, will not only let sales people make calls to prospects directly from the browser-based CRM application. It will also log the call. And in the next release, it will be able to record portions of a call at a click of the button and transcribe it (Ribbit uses speech-to-text technology from SimulScribe). Other developers have used the same transcription functionality to create phone apps that let people leave voice messages on blogs or on people’s Facebook FunWalls that then get turned into text comments. In the future you might call a friend and hear, “Press 1 to leave a private message, Press 2 to leave a message on my FunWall.” Ribbit has big ambitions. If it can deliver on half of them, it just might become Silicon Valley’s first phone company.
Here is a screen shot of the Salesforce app (click to enlarge):
Rad!
Officially launches today? I saw these guys at Dreamforce several months ago.
I saw the opening video on the home page.
Ribbit is a “new type of phone company”
We have a “new type of team”
We have a “new type of technology”
We have a “new type of business model”
Uh oh….we have a “new economy” …. again
This is simply managed services. The major telcos have been doing it for years. That said, it does seem they’re appealing to the web developers. Something to be said for reducing the complexity inherent in telco dev.
But, it’s a scale business like all telephony. Since Ribbit buys transport from one of the major telcos, it will NEVER have the best transport rates. Even if you make it cheaper to create an app, the savings will be somewhat lost in slightly transport costs assuming it’s a high-call volume app deployed on 800 inbound.
So, they have two roles: one, to be a big cost saver on the app dev side; or two, make it easier to create new and novel apps that will find a market place.
Definitely worth a try, but i think they don’t realize how much competition they already have in both areas.
But good luck nonetheless!
This is very cool. I so want to be an indie telco!
Thanks for digging into the disruptive details.
Like Diddy said:
“I am an MVNO [widget]“
@4: I don’t think they need to supplant the big guys to do very well here. Any big company with a call center operation of hundreds or thousands of people will likely benefit from a custom software and transport rate operation. BUT there are a number of smaller companies out there who would never get great transport rates and have an inherently different cost structure that is likely driven more by app development, deployment, integration, and a different kind of overhead. If these guys can solve that problem then I’m guessing they will help a lot of people and companies.
Nothing new here. This company doesn’t have a clue what to do so they are hoping someone will build something great on “their platform”, which by the way is simply a commodity these days.
Adolf, I think you’ve got it. These guys will live or die on the quality of the apps that get built for Ribbit, not cheaper phone calls.
What I’ve been looking for is a hosted ability to do VUI (touch tone menues etc) and speech to text and voice recognition would be extremely nice too! If Ribbit can handle this, I think you’ll find a lot applications for their API…
If not, I think programmers will get a bit frustraited at the lack of user interaction on the standard phone side of things (the ability to call in on my phone to get some info from a database instead of going to a website for examplee)
-John
Dude sounds a bit ancient, wait till you see a real Startup coming later in 2008.
Yes it is mine, been over a year in the works and we are about to close our first round of investment for 10 mil.
Will keep you all informed.
Johnny
a side question, is there enough bandwidth for this? maybe becuase i am in small town india, and youtube is impossible, but it does seem like the ideas floating around assume that bandwidth is infinite, and i wonder
how will the make money? who pays for the phone call? The users? So this will be like skype but within a browser?
This is an interesting concept that will most certainly put any of the pay per call application providers that are still around out of business. Some that come to mind are ingenio, voicestar, estara, etc…. It’s also cool that it’s os and browser independent since it’s based on flash.
Thanks Erick.
And BTW, pls do your readers a service: remind them that telco is the most scale-iest of scale businesses.
The next time you see ANY telco-related app/service NewCo, ask 1) how they’ll generate 10s of millions of calls, and 2) how they’ll earn fractions of a cent on a per minute basis to build a real company.
No doubt it should be a LOT easier to build/deploy/host phone apps. Angel has been fighting this fight for about 6+ yrs; Prem [insert impossibly-hard Indian last name here] at Telera and now Transera has been trying to eliminate app complexity for a decade or more; Qwest has the QWCC, etc…
But at the end of the day one makes money on either a new or better app/svc people will pay for, directly or through recip comp rate arbitrage.
Again, not a single thing new here. But it should be said no one has pulled it off yet. So I’m rooting for Ribbit.
But pls kill the opening video. Like someone said above, it reeks of pre-bubble gobbley-gook speeck.
Sorry TechCrunch, credit where credit is due.
Rabbit is nothing special. So why are you going on about it so much???
All it is using is Asterisk FREE VoIP type back end. (Old news, making huge weaves in Telco industry as it works really well for free software. Many BIG ITSP use it in very large enterprise areas).
Plus, Adobe is coming out with VoIP services built into FlashPlayer10 next year.
These are all open and common API’s. AND YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THEM.
Rabbit just seems like it has run to the top of the mountain first and is trying to own it before.. well its truely open.
James
Well said James.
Can you point me to some of the info on Adobe’s push in to VOIP and it’s common APIS? Thanks.
AbS
Its the era of TEB2.0 (Telephony + Web)2.0
Checkout a new startup with unique services.
http://www.LimeAll.com
Sounds tinny and mechanical!
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Ok, for those who want a SNEEK PEEK at FlashPlayer 10 VoIP features. see the following youtube video from Adobe MAX conference.
Adobe MAX Barcelona - Pacifica Sneak Peek
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_RLwwxQOUc
There are also other interesting flash improvements.
As we know h.264 is available NOW,
and also better 3D capabilities.
At some (other) conferences I have attended lately, many evangelists think that 3D type interfaces then give more depth to moving around an interface are a big thing of the future. (I’m sceptical) but it still makes for amazing funky interface capabilities.
Thanks,
James
When I first stumbled on this post I thought I had hit the wrong button and found a post from a couple of years ago.
All this company is doing is taking it one step further than Skypes API. The fact they use a Lucent switch makes them really no different than Sylantro or Broadsoft.
As mentioned in another post Asterisk can achieve all these things without much of a CapEx. If they are using anything other than Asterisks than OOPS!. Today, you can rent a server and sign up with an Asterisk related carrier and voila you can offer dial tone. The beauty here is that there’s NO LONGER a need to buy telephony boards which was once a huge barrier to entry. All the voice processing is done at the CPU level.
May be next time the VC’s will call me when they want some due diligence completed? Unfortunately, I feel Ribbit is going to have a tough time gaining traction in an already crowded marketplace.
What in the world does AJAX have to do with microphones?
What a confusing message, but good to see such company launching! Check this out folks, it’s definitely not built using Ribbit, Asterisk or any of the stuff mentioned, but here’s an example of convergence of web 2.0 (social networking, telephony, IM) and etc. Have fun!!!
apps.facebook.com/telemoticon
As already mentioned by others Asterisk developers were doing these for a while. What about Tellme, BeVocal, Voxeo, Nuance, etc VoiceXML platforms, they have been allowing developers for 10+ years bulding applications in their platform. Nuance closed their developer site few years back though. I guess the buzzwords “The Platform” and “Voice 2.0″ worked for them pretty good.
Does anybody know detail about this AJAX and Microphone issue, please post little more than just AJAX don’t have access to the microphone.
The article says Silverlight supports access to the microphone as well. I don’t believe that is true (at least not yet). If I’m wrong about that, please correct me.
We have developed a Voice 2.0 application, Voice and Web integration with user generated content.
http://www.voicebubble.com
Seems like a very cool concept, look really foward to it.
This is exactly what I predicted Ribbit would do when I wrote about it in July (Ribbit was in stealth mode then)… “Ribbit appears to be a softswitch-based VoIP telephony service that is accessible from a browser via a Flash application. Flash works on both PC environments and on mobile devices, so it would be a good choice for a service that runs on both PCs and mobile devices and offers a great user experience.”
See more at http://techuntangled.com/what-is-ribbit-up-to
This is going to be pretty good…but an also ran…ala Jaxtr
Ribbit solution shows how the web will revolutionize the way we use communication solutions. Nevertheless, they are not the only one to provide a full web based flash phone and telecommunication environment.
Digitrad: http://www.digitrad.com is also providing this service and did a demo in October of this year in the Valley.
http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/ar.....esses.html
Digitrad platform also provides an API and also a direct interconnect with Skype as they are Skype Voice Servive Partner like Voxeo, Tellme and Angel. Digitrad’s unique advantage is also to be a real SS7 and class 5 telecom operator providing all services from the phone numbers, click-to-call solutions, IVRs, PBX features and routing of the calls. This complete integration allows Digitrad platform to provide its services and access to its platform at the lowest cost.
Inexbee, french company, leader in multimedia convergence services, is about to launch similar services both directly to the consumer market http://www.mylivio.com and in a white label model for e-commerce and community website http://www.livio-oneclick.com .
Many majors e-commerce website have already expressed interests.
Moreover, the interesting point is that Inexbee has already developed a more complete technology, as its solution includes video from flash to mobile device !