Ribbit, the startup that is building a platform for Voice 2.0 apps, is creating a Web-based phone service for consumers codenamed “Amphibian.” The point of Amphibian is both to demonstrate the capabilities of Ribbit’s technology and to serve as a marketplace for Ribbit developers to showcase and sell their own voice apps. Co-founders Ted Griggs and Crick Waters dropped by my office last week to give me a sneak peak at the service, which will launch publicly in a few months. Amphibian in a nutshell, says Crick, is the “convergence of your personal mobile communications with your personal web experience.”
Let’s start with the communications part. Amphibian is a Web-based phone that acts as a command center for all of your incoming and outgoing calls, no matter what number people use. It effectively gives you a universal phone number. Whether someone calls your home, office, or cell phone, or even rings you on Skype, Google Talk, or MSN Messenger, you can answer all the calls on Amphibian or route them to wherever is most convenient for you. “The codename is Amphibian,” explains Crick, “because it lives equally well outside the Web as inside the Web.” During a live demo, Ted called Crick’s cell phone, and Crick answered it on Amphibian. In the middle of the call, he transferred it back to his cell, which rang, and he picked up the conversation where he left off.
At its heart, Amphibian is a Flash phone that can call other Web-based voice clients or regular phones. It is built on Adobe Flex, so an AIR version will be available as well that can sit on your desktop without your browser having to be open to the Amphibian Web page all the time. And since it is Flash, the phone can look like anything, even a chalkboard, and you will be able to embed it into other sites, like your Facebook page or your iGoogle page. (In the screen shots left and right, the black rectangle is the same working Ribbit phone in two different Web settings).
Amphibian lets you synchronize your contacts with Plaxo, and will soon support other services. You can also see someone’s associated feeds from Flickr, YouTube, Google News, LinkedIn, or his blog while you are talking to him. Think of it as Caller ID 2.0. There is also a “call rescue” feature that, if you speed dial Amphibian right after a call goes to voicemail, it lets you listen in as the other person is leaving the message and interrupt to save the call. For some reason, this feature is particularly popular with women, who either lose their phones in their purses all the time or simply like to screen their calls.
Amphibian will be free for Internet calls, but there will be a charge for calls to regular phones along the lines of $5 a month for four hours of talk-time or $15 a month for unlimited calls in the U.S. (the company is still working out the pricing). Developers will be able to add additional services, browsable in a market area of the site, for which they can charge extra or give away for free. For instance, one of Ribbit’s partners is SimulScribe, which offers a visual voicemail service starting at $10 a month that transcribes your voicemails so you can read them like e-mails. (SimulScribe also just settled a patent suit related to this technology). Another developer created a ShoutCast app for blogs that lets readers leave voice-comments or call in at pre-set times. Stay tuned for beta invites.
1st that..
Ribbit is extremely cool and useful. Use it everyday.
Unified Communications at its works.
http://tekno-world.blogspot.com
Absolutely sexy - almost to the extreme… Hopefully no Verizons will be there to screw another nice thing up and block it somehow on their handsets… Way to go Ribbit!
How is this any different from GrandCentral?
So…its GrandCentral + Flash + Skype. Whoop d fuckin do…
OK, just when i think I have these guys sussed out, they confuse me…and i’m in Telco and know precisely how they’re doing their tech.
What I can’t answer is the “why”?
It seems they’re simply making it easier for people to deploy a softphone, and allowing it to link to other phones (hard or soft). At the end of the day they need to be selling something–either ports, metered usage, or both.
They’re buying bandwidth from someone, and deploying a bunch of asterisk servers. So they’re a phone company, nothing novel so far.
How does this scale? They might get some efficiencies by managing apps for multiple NewVoiceCos, which would allow them to minimize port costs (dial-out needs a port), but is htis significant enough?
Part of me wants to say there’s a lot here and that they’re on the verge of releasing something really great. The pragmatic part of me looks at these mundane announcements and sees burning solutions looking for a problem.
Can anyone tell me what I’m missing?
Don Thorson, Ribbit here. Thanks Erick. Amphibian is “feature rich”, which is what makes it so useful, but it also makes it tricky to describe - so thanks for taking the time to lay it out. The refreshed Ribbit site just went up this morning so I’d encourage people to go there to get more info on everything it does.
Also, and you touch on this, we’re hoping developers understand that Ribbit is open, so they can write their own voiceware apps - most everything you see in Amphibian, they can add into their own web applications. and the Amphibian environment is also open. meaning you’ll be able to write plug-ins, widgets, even phones that integrate and extend the Amphibian webtop as well.
We’ll check in later. We’re down at the DEMO, getting things ready for a live walk-through tomorrow morning.
Don
ria weekly podcast had great interview with one of these guys recently. worth a listen
Like Ribbit, Inexbee is announcing tomorrow in France the launch of its Web-telephony service activity : LIVIO.
Livio is offering full voice and video calls from any website in just one click, with no software installation, to any landline or mobile line.
Moreover, the call is audio AND video with a very good quality.
The consumer service is marketed under mylivio brand : http://www.mylivio.com and soon will be available in english.
Inexbee is already discussing with e-commerce website and community website. Its Livio APIs and SDK will be shortly available for developers, integrators and web agencies.
Thanks Marshall,
For those interested in the podcast, it’s here - http://redmonk.com/cote/2008/0.....dn-rumors/
=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com
I can’t tell from the site…can/will Ribbit accept text messages, too? This is the one thing keeping me from using Grand Central as my main contact number.
Sounds like GrandCentral and with backing from Google I imagine they will leapfrog right over Ribbit.
i keep hearing this mention that skype will be intergrated. i really want to see that in action. i hope that ribbit is prepared for what could be extrodinary popularity of that one component. skype is very heavy on resources and could place a very heavy toll on total server capacity. the only way i can see around that being an issue is if they charge per minute fees for skype calling or if they require skype to be loaded onto your PC and therefore they do not proxy thoose calls or allow them to be forwarded to any of your other platforms.
Have people seen what LignUp has been doing for over a year now?
Wake up and look around folks
SG
nice UI good color use
Ifbyphone is much better, easier to configure – Listed as one of the top Innovations of ’07, they offer free Phone-Me-Now for 6 months and 1,000 free minutes of services —
The ‘Voice of the Web’ is the first zero configuration click-to-call voice & web mashup out there for all size companies.
Here is the link, to try it out for free:
http://public.ifbyphone.com/in...../8/p_ID/58