BT announced that it has acquired Silicon Valley based Ribbit for $105 million in cash. On July 9 we reported that Ribbit executives were telling friends the deal was done while simultaneously denying it to the press. One thing we got wrong was the price, though. We were hearing $55 million, $5 million more than competitor GrandCentral managed to wrangle out of Google. Ribbit got nearly double that.

Ribbit has raised just $13 million from Allegis Capital, KPG Ventures and Alsop Louie Ventures. That makes this exit nearly a ten-bagger just two and a half years after launch.

BT will keep the Ribbit team intact in Silicon Valley and use the acquisition to try to win mind share among developers. Ribbit is a platform for creating voice-based applications over the Internet. BT will now be able to run those applications over its backbone network at a lower cost than Ribbit was able to lease those lines (calls to landline and mobile phones need to go over regular telephone lines at some point). Ribbit is an attractive way for BT to ramp up software revenues. And its soft switch technology (a software-based telephone switch) could start to pop up throughout BT’s network, where it would add more flexibility and create cost savings.

Whether or not developers want to rush into the arms of a telco is another question. By becoming part of BT, Ribbit will no longer be seen as a neutral player. And developers may fear getting locked into a relationship with one large telephone company, especially if they are trying to create apps to displace telephone companies in general. BT and Ribbit will have to overcome that fear by being more open than anyone else and offering the best platform for creating voice-enabled apps. Skype and Google’s GrandCentral are other potential competitors.

Update: I just spoke with Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs and JP Rangaswami, a managing director at BT. Griggs says:

At the end of the day we are trying to make BT into a software company. BT has never acquired a pre-revenue company before.

Rangaswami emphasizes that what BT is buying is the team, the technology, and access to developers in Silicon Valley (Ribbit has already attracted about 5,000 to its platform). He adds:

It is very unusual for us to even be making a play across the pond. It is not an experiment.

We wanted to up the ante in the global communications platform trade. We could have been an AT&T and provide pipes. We could have been an Apple and innovate around the pipes. Or we could have been a Google and serve ads around the pipes. But as we envisioned the world of open-based platforms, it had to be global and scale digitally, so it had to be about software.

Below is an Elevator Pitch from Ribbit founders Ted Griggs and Crick Waters explaining what Ribbit does:

This is a strange story. Rumors circulated today that Silicon Valley based startup Ribbit was acquired by British Telecom, and VentureBeat ran with the story. The company later denied the rumors, but wouldn’t comment on whether or not merger discussions were occurring or not.

The strange part is this - while Ribbit executives are denying the acquisition to the press, they’ve simultaneously been (quite happily) telling all their friends that BT has acquired them for $55 million, says a source who’s heard the story.

BT plans to use the Ribbit platform to build out a GrandCentral competitor, they’ve said. GrandCentral, a service that manages all of your phone services, was acquired by Google in July 2007 for $50 million. Since the acquisition, however, GrandCentral has gone nowhere - no new features and intermittent down time are the only GrandCentral milestones over the last year.

From past experience, this suggests a deal is in the process of closing but isn’t legally done yet, which gives executives the ability to deny acquisition rumors. But like most leaks, the company getting bought just can’t not tell their friends (loosely defined) all about it. Confidentially, of course.

Ribbit has raised $13 million in capital.

Tomorrow BroadSoft, a VoIP software provider for telecom companies that’s been around since 1998, will officially announce a platform for integrating voice into web applications. The company’s new offering, BroadSoft Xtended, will enable developers to add voice capabilities to their applications and then showcase these applications in a centralized directory called the Xtended Marketplace.

Comparisons can be drawn most easily to Ribbit, which late last year debuted its own platform for integrating voice into web apps; the company even went so far as to call itself “Silicon Valley’s First Phone Company.” The idea of integrating VoIP into web apps, of course, is not restricted to these two companies: Jangl, Jaxtr, and TringMe all let you add simple call buttons to your website, for example. These aren’t exactly platforms, however - for another one of these, you’d have to look at something like MyVox, Lypp, or BT’s CallFlow, which was announced very recently itself.

Like Ribbit, BroadSoft doesn’t yet have many applications built on its platform and available for consumers - as of today just an Internet Explorer toolbar called Assistant Xtended and a Salesforce “unified connector”, although we’re told a dozen applications will be available tomorrow. Among these will be a Facebook application called ClicktoMessage that will allow users to place calls from profile pages. Except for this Facebook app, users who place calls using apps built on top of BroadSoft will need to be customers of one of the company’s 300 service providers, which include 7 of the top 10 carriers in the US (such as Verizon and Sprint).

One thing that’s not clear is how BroadSoft plans to make money from its platform. Developers will be able to use it for free and license their creations to service providers and end users for a price. This scheme contrasts with Ribbit’s plan to charge developers per call, and MyVox’s system of making money off voice advertisements.

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.

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):

Earlier this morning, I posted about TringMe and the coming flood of Flash-based Web phones. I forgot to mention Ribbit, which is about to publicly unleash an entire development platform for building Flash phones on December 13. Ribbit’s development platform is already in private beta and allows programmers to build Web phones that can make, receive, and record calls, send voice messages, and manage contacts. Ribbit runs the back-end VOIP service, and it supports applications built on both Adobe Flex and AIR. (Read more about Ribbit here).

One developer, Joe Johnston, used Adobe AIR and Ribbit to create an Adobe AIR iPhone that looks just like a regular iPhone and can actually make calls from your desktop. This is not a Flash phone because it opens up as a separate Adobe AIR app in your browser. But it gives you a good sense of the types of interfaces that are possible, and that we may be seeing a lot more of soon. Here is a video of the phone making a call that shows how it works (and a slicker demo of the same app can be found here):