Sure, Google Voice is cool, but it's not necessarily the best Web-meets-phone service one can imagine, is it? The field is still open, and switchboard-in-the-cloud company Ribbit (a division of BT) will stir things up when users get their hands on Ribbit Mobile, a new telephony service for consumers.
Like Google Voice as of last week, Ribbit Mobile adds services to your existing mobile phone number, using a standard telephone company service called Conditional Call Forwarding. You set up your phone service to route to the service when you don't pick up the phone, and it gives you all its features on the calls it then grabs: voicemail, forwarding, routing, and so on.
Ribbit Mobile isn't purely a mobile app, name notwithstanding. Rather, the "Mobile" means that your phone number becomes nomadic, moving to and temporarily setting up residence on whatever voice platform you want to use at any moment, be it a mobile number, a landline, or a VoIP system. Users set up their Ribbit Mobile features on a Flash-based Web site. Smartphone apps are coming, as is, most likely, another Apple app store approval drama.
Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs doesn't seem to want Ribbit compared directly to Google Voice, since Ribbit is a telephony platform company with ambitions well beyond the consumer app. Ribbit's revenues to date have come from its platform business. But Ribbit Mobile will be compared with Google Voice, and it's a fair and interesting battle.
Ribbit Mobile does a lot, but the Flash app is a little busy.
(Credit: Ribbit)Ribbit Mobile bests Google Voice in a few key ways. Its voicemail transcription feature will be better, although users won't get that feature for nothing. Free users will get machine speech-to-text, with likely the same quality of amusing and borderline-useless transcriptions as in Google Voice. But paid users will also have the option of using human-assisted transcription so their voicemail-to-text messages are actually sensible and useful.
Ribbit can also connect to VoIP services like Skype or SIP phones (Google works with phone-company phones and SIP, but not directly with Skype), as well as voice-chat features in some IM services, and you can transfer calls between phones while you're talking.
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Ribbit puts a conference bridge inside a Wave message.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)It's becoming clear that Google Wave, which is slowly emerging from closed beta, has potential to be much more than a text-messaging platform. As the telecommunications platform company Ribbit shows, and as does a frothy little videoconference app from 6 Rounds, Wave's architecture makes it a compelling platform for real-time streaming communication.
The Ribbit team recently showed me their prototype widget, which lets Wave users quickly set up a conference room inside a "wave" message on the service. Once you add the Ribbit conference widget to a wave, everyone in it becomes part of a potential voice chat. Users need to enter their phone numbers, which remain hidden from other users. Then anyone in the wave can call all the participants at once to start a conference. (Users can also call only particular people in the wave, if they wish.)
The cool thing about the Ribbit integration into Wave is how easy it is to get a conference going that's clearly related to a document (a wave) that a team is already working on. You also get a dashboard view of your conference where you can see who's on and who's not, and drop callers mid-stream.
Future additions to the service will include options to record calls and transcribe them -- for a fee perhaps.
6 Rounds is conceptually related to Ribbit, although with more of a focus on fun videoconferencing (with silly video effects and everything) and the sharing of YouTube videos. But the idea is the same: Within a de facto group on Wave, you can quickly add a conferencing widget to bring people into a conversation. See also Zorap from Demo, which is similar, although without a Wave widget.
It looks like both of these apps blend perfectly with the Wave experience, which is part e-mail, part IM, part groupware. They show how, in a modern communications system, the barriers between text and voice and video communication, and more interestingly between asynchronous and real-time communication, really do begin to dissolve.
What's not clear is how or if Google will integrate Google Voice into Wave. That's a big shoe that has yet to drop.
Click to see video demos of Ribbit, 6 Rounds, and other Google Wave extensions.
The Under the Radar conference kicked off this morning with one of my favorite panels: three video and voice companies that are trying to take services we're already using and make them better.
First up was Eyejot, which we've covered several times. The core service revolves around video e-mail, although it has recently moved into other areas like Eyejot This, which lets you annotate Web pages with video clips from your Webcam (and even share them via Twitter). There's also a platform that lets site owners add video notes and mail to their service.
There are two levels of service, one free with limited storage and time-expired messages, and premium plans that add additional storage and archiving. Eyejot's CEO David Gellar says the company has enjoyed a "double digit uptake" of users who upgrade to the pro.
Gellar also noted that a mobile client for the service is not in works (at the moment). Gellar calls the mobile field a "moving target" because of hardware and network differentiations between the U.S. carriers.
Ribbit, a telephony platform that's meant to be integrated into Web applications, showed off its wares. Its application for Salesforce.com is launching next month and will cost $25/mo per user. VP of Technology Crick Waters demonstrated the upcoming interface and noted that more than 53,000 calls have been made on developer network. The coolest feature is a familiar looking telephone keypad that can be integrated into Web apps and services.
Ribbit's consumer application called Amphibian, which blends your Web presence with your mobile phone, is launching in the next few months. We profiled it back when it was announced at DemoFALL.
Ribbit's Salesforce.com app will let you call your contacts right from Salesforce. It's launching next month. (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Vello, "the conference that calls you," solves a wonderfully irritating problem with conference-calling services. Instead of having people deal with special call in numbers and PIN codes, it only requires meeting creators to plug in phone numbers (from Outlook or your Web contact list) and the service will create the conference call and phone all the members. It also has a single number people need to call (1-888-Vello) that will connect you to the right conference based on your phone number.
Mark Dzwonczyk, president and COO of Vello, showed off the service live by calling nearly everyone in the room who had given their numbers up at the cocktail party the night before. The one rub is that minutes on Vello cost nearly three times the price of normal conference calls for the host. Dzwonczyk says that the company will adjust to market prices, but for now are going for large businesses that are going for simplicity.
Be sure to keep an eye on Webware throughout the day. We'll have continuing conference coverage as the day progresses.
Update: Fixed Vello's URL and and info on Eyejot's mobile efforts. For more see the comments. (thanks David)
Ribbit on Monday announced details of its Web-based telephony business, which includes a developer platform and plans for a voice service for consumers next year.
The company has built a telephony switch that can connect Web-based phone calls to a variety of phone networks, including voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, services like Skype.
Ribbit has already integrated it voice service with Salesforce.com.
(Credit: Ribbit)As previously reported, developers can access those voice services through Flex-based application programming interfaces (APIs) and with Adobe Systems' Flash browser plug-in.
Through the APIs, developers can add the ability to send and receive calls from a Web application and transcribe a voice message into text.
By having APIs available to others, the company hopes to create a rich set of features on top of its voice platform, according to company CEO Ted Griggs.
It also intends to make its own applications, including a consumer voice service, which it plans to introduce in the first quarter of 2008.
Ribbit has already integrated its service with Salesforce.com. It lets people keep a log of calls made to sales contacts, as well as view voice mail and e-mail messages.
The company intends to make money by charging directly for its voice service or sharing revenue with partners that use its platform to embed voice services, executives said.
In a demo, company executives showed how its voice component can be operate within a Web page. The phone pad appears as a small window that can be moved.
The company chose to build its platform using Adobe front-end Web technology, even though Adobe, too, is building peer-to-peer voice capabilities into Flash with a product code-named Pacifica.
Ribbit's Griggs said Ribbit has built on top of lower-level services with more traditional telephony services, including billing.
A company called Ribbit came out of stealth mode this week, showing off a "phone component" that will let developers embed Internet calling into Web applications.
"The Ribbit Phone Component will give rich Internet application developers the ability to make and receive calls, record/send and receive voice mail, as well as add and manage contacts," according to a description on the company blog.
A schedule posted on Ribbit's site indicates that a beta version of the product will be released in October.
The Ribbit Phone Component appears to be competing with the developer tools available for the popular voice over IP service Skype. On the consumer end of things is YackPack, which allows end users to drop embed code into Web sites for voice calls.
In the company blog, Ribbit said that its component will allow users to click on a phone number in a Web page to make a call.
There are other communications features as well, including the ability to integrate voice mail and contacts.
Last year, there were reports that Adobe was building voice-over-IP capability into its Flash Player.
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