Where Does Ribbit Fit in the Web-Based VoIP Universe?
Source: mashable.com
Ribbit, 
a platform for building web-based voice applications, has officially launched today to a bit of fanfare, as it rides two of the year’s big trends: open development platforms and web-based VoIP. We first caught wind of the company back in August, when we learned of their plans for making and receiving calls via a flash player that can be embedded on any web page.
Since then, I’ve personally become a big fan of services like Jajah and Jangl for making international calls, and we’ve seen Jaxtr, which offers a flash-based widget for making calls via your friend’s blogs and profiles, blow up to 5 million users. While social networks have served as a vehicle for the “three Js of VoIP” to take off, all three of these companies had deep funding and needed to make significant investments in infrastructure to make their services possible (Jangl and Jajah even partnered up to share the burden).
By offering the technology platform for web-based VoIP, Ribbit is looking to significantly lower the barriers to entry for application developers. For an example of their technology, Ribbit has built an app for Salesforce.com that allows users to make calls from within the interface and will then keep track of call records, transcripts, etc, in turn bringing voice inside a CRM tool, which, is sort of what I was envisioning when I opined that Google should buy Jangl and Pluggd and integrate them with Gmail. While a businessy-app like this might not sound sexy, it gives you an idea of the type of products you might be able to build for consumer-based social networks like Facebook, or, as stand-alone new services.
Ribbit’s business model is a smart one: charge third-party developers a subscription fee based on the number of users their application attracts. This is good for both the developer and Ribbit – no costs up front, and both parties win if a service takes off. The company has raised $13 million in venture capital, so they’ll have some time to ramp up.
On the other hand, the aforementioned current leaders in web-based VoIP could also move towards offering their own development platforms, allowing users to expand on what are already a pretty good set of tools for web-based calling. As far as the business model, they can offer these developers a share of revenue that the applications generate through more calling minutes.
In any event, it will be interesting to see what types of applications users start building with Ribbit, and if their competitors start moving in a similar direction to fuel further growth. Definitely a space to watch in 2008.
