Ribbit receives rave reviews at Adobe MAX for Platform launch and Killer App Challenge

November 20th, 2008 by Don Thorson | located in API, BT, Conferences, Developers, Platform, Ribbit, ted griggs | No Comments » | trackback

This week at the Adobe MAX Conference, Ribbit announced the launch of the Ribbit developer platform, opening the doors to software developers, integrators, and carriers around the globe that are looking for ways to develop and deploy the next-generation of telecommunications services. The launch has implications for broad sectors of the global telephony industry — developers, integrators and carriers alike.

The Ribbit Team was at hand to answer questions and showcase partner applications built on our Ribbit 2.5 Platform. The new platform enables developers to bring new communication services to market — designing, testing, deploying, pricing, billing, and monitoring the application, performing each of these functions in a user-friendly, Web-based, on-demand environment.

The news of our Platform release was picked up around the planet by news outlets and bloggers including TMCNet, Venturebeat, Mashable, CNET, PCWorld, and syndicated on Marketwatch, International Business Times, Digital Producer Magazine, IT Business Net, PR-USA. The industry and developer reviews were more than positive. Often highlighted was Ribbit’s Killer App Challenge we had announced Monday,  where we are awarding $100,000 for the best business productivity, media, social network, and next-generation applications to be created using the Ribbit API.

Tags: adobe max, BT, cnet, Flash, flex, Killer App Challenge, MarketWatch, mashable, Ribbit, Ribbit 2.5, telephony, VentureBeat

Ribbit’s Killer App Challenge Launches at Adobe MAX

November 17th, 2008 by Don Thorson | located in Conferences, Events, Flash, Platform, Ribbit | No Comments » | trackback

Ribbit is pleased to announce our $100,000 Killer App Challenge, a chance for developers to create the next killer application on the Ribbit open platform for integrating voice communications in applications, web sites, and communities.

The competition begins immediately and will conclude in March 2009. Cash prizes totaling $100,000 will be awarded to the most compelling, creative, and useful application in each of five development categories, as well as a grand prize for the best overall entrant.

The Killer App Challenge is an unparalleled opportunity for creative professionals, developers and entrepreneurs to have their ideas launched on this global stage. We’re looking for the kind of apps that will improve interactions between business and user, help brands better interact with their audiences, and evolve social networking into the next level of essential communication..

The five contest categories are:

1. Media, Advertising and Entertainment — Add unprecedented interactive value to a media campaign by captivating a target audience through rich voice capabilities
2. Social Networking and Communication — Create a Web 3.0 preview application that connects people via Open Telephony
3. Business and Productivity — Integrate voice and rich communication features into a business application workflow
4. Carrier, Network, or ISP Integration — Integrate innovative voice capabilities into an existing cable, carrier, mobile network, or ISP
5. Wildcard — Create an application that uses voice to improve the usability of any device or interface, from vending machines to ticket kiosks

Developers retain full ownership of their applications, so even those applications not chosen as a contest winner can be deployed to deliver exciting new voice capabilities to customers, partners and employees.

For a complete description of the rules and prizes of the Ribbit Killer App Challenge, visit www.ribbit.com/killerappchallenge

Tags: adobemax, BT, Flash, flex, Ribbit, telephony, Voice

We are LIVE at MAX

November 17th, 2008 by Don Thorson | located in Uncategorized | No Comments » | trackback

This week we are LIVE at Adobe MAX Conference in San Francisco and will be talking about how with Ribbit you be more creative, more productive and add value and profitability to your work.

There will be lots of useful information for developers at MAX: all week long we will be showcasing some powerful new apps at our Booth #314; we will also be announcing an exciting new contest to get the community fired up; and best of all Chuck Freedman, our Director of Ribbit’s Developer Platform will be presenting at MAX on Monday, November 17, 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm - so be sure to check in regularly at the Ribbit developer blog for all the laterst information on MAX.,

We hope to see you all at MAX 2008 in San Francisco.

SayHear.Org, a Ribbit Powered ‘voice your vote’ App goes live

November 2nd, 2008 by Don Thorson | located in API, Developers, Platform, Ribbit, Voice | 1 Comment » | trackback

SayHear.org is a very cool web app that PJ Onori and the Creative Agency, Gershoni built using an AJAX UI and the Ribbit API for voice features. We simply adore this interactive app for its elegance and resourcefulness given that this election is poised to be historic with record-breaking numbers of voter turnout.

Callers dial a the number associated with their party affiliation and leave a message on why they decided to vote for their candidate.

* 805.456.5763: Barack Obama
* 805.456.5764: John McCain
* 805.456.5765: 3rd Party
* 805.456.5766: Not Voting

Once they do this, they can hop on over to www.sayhear.org to listen to what the rest of the country has to say in real time.

Tags: gershoni, PJ Onori, sayhear.org, vote

Ribbit At Adobe MAX, November 17-19th

October 29th, 2008 by Don Thorson | located in Chuck Freedman, Conferences, Flash, Platform, Ribbit, Uncategorized | No Comments » | trackback

Ribbit is alive this month as we get ready for the Adobe MAX Conference in San Francisco on November 17th-19th. MAX is the largest gathering of Flex and Flash Developers in the world and it gives us our best opportunity to talk directly with our 7,000+ developer community to share our latest platform tools and inventions.

Being a programmable phone company, means our greatest asset is our developers and we’ve been working hard to bring this community everything they need to integrate rich voice and communication into their Flash and Flex projects. We’ll have Ribbit Developers on hand at MAX the entire time, to show you what we’ve been up to and how to use Ribbit to help change the way we all think of communications.

We are particularly excited that Chuck Freedman, our Director of Ribbit’s Developer Platform, will be presenting at MAX on Monday, November 17, 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

If you are coming to MAX, plan on coming by our booth 314. We’ll be looking forward to seeing you.

Hello Again

October 21st, 2008 by Don Thorson | located in API, Chuck Freedman, Conferences, Events, Salesforce | No Comments » | trackback

Ribbit 2.5 Update: Yes, we have been very quiet here at Ribbit. Mt. View offices as our Developers work to put the final touches on our new Ribbit 2.5 API which enters pre-release this week. The new release will support a host of exciting new features including Outbound SMS Messaging, Contact Caching, and Call Event Monitoring. We are really excited about the encouraging feedback we have received, especially on our roadshows where Chuck Freedman, the Director of Ribbit’s Developer Platform, has been engaging our greater developer community. If you would like to sign up for the pre-release hop on over to our sign-up page and we will reach out when new seats are available.

Conferences

Emerging Technology Conference, Sept 22- 25th, MIT Campus: Ribbit was proud to be invited to the Emerging Technology Conference on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA where we had the opportunity to exchange ideas with fellow tech innovators such as Intuit, Microsoft, Amazon and Intel, and a host of engrossed student developers. Conversations ranged from exciting partnership opportunities to ideas for integration with interesting new applications such as virtual worlds and online gaming. Our Ribbit 2.5 API was well received and we are thrilled to be recognized as a leader among the developer and innovator community.

Partnerships

Ribbit Joins Oracle’s CRM On Demand Inner Circle: Ribbit is busy building partnerships with Industry leaders. In late September, Oracle announced Ribbit’s addition to its prestigious Oracle PartnerNetwork. This enables the industry-leading Oracle(R) CRM On Demand application to add voice automation via Ribbit’s carrier-grade telephony platform. By incorporating voice into the Oracle CRM On Demand workflow, mobile workers can dramatically increase productivity and close more deals while on the go.

Ribbit Partners with Sylantro Systems: Ribbit Partners with Sylantro Systems: On Oct, 15th 2008 Ribbit announced a partnership with Sylantro to integrate the Ribbit Platform with Sylantro’s Synergy Platform and Synapps Web Services. The joint solution will enable developers to create and monetize rich, powerful, Flash-based telephony applications more quickly and easily, bringing the innovation from Ribbit’s growing developer community to Sylantro-powered service providers. At the Sylantro Global Summit in Las Vegas, Sylantro and Ribbit demonstrated this joint platform on Ribbit for Salesforce and was well received by the developer community.

Where to Catch Us Next

AJAX world, Oct 20-22nd, San Jose, CA: Chuck Freedman will be presenting at AJAX World, the largest West Coast event devoted to AJAX, Rich Internet Applications, and Enterprise Web 2.0. We will demo how easily your customers or clients can make and receive calls from your flash application without leaving the webpage or picking up the phone.

Dreamforce, Nov 2nd–5th, San Francisco, CA: The Ribbit team will be at the Dreamforce Conference on Nov 2nd–5th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Dreamforce is the largest Software-as-a-Service event, focused on generating developer, partner and customer success with Salesforce CRM applications and the Force.com platform. Our Team will be available to talk about how Ribbit for Salesforce delivers voice memos and voicemails, directly to Salesforce accounts, from any mobile phone.

To stay up-to-date with all that’s new at Ribbit including new features, Conferences and Announcements be sure to sign up on our developer page.

Tags: AJAX World, dreamforce, Emerging Technology Conference, MIT, On Demand Inner Circle, Salesforce, Sylantro

Ribbit: Integrating with BT

September 2nd, 2008 by Don Thorson | located in BT, Crick Waters, Developers, SmartSwitch, ted griggs | No Comments » | trackback

As we settle in to our colorful new digs, there’s more on our minds than integrating the Ribbit and BT design themes. We’re seeing a clear course for bringing our platform more fully into alignment with all that BT has established, with the first steps in our partnership taking us all futher along on a path we believe in.

That’s great for us—and it’s even more fulfilling when outside observers look in on us and also “get” the connection. Read what Jon Arnold, Principal of J Arnold & Associates, says in his recent IP Communications post.

“Ribbit sees voice as one feature in the data network rather than being THE application that the business is built around. They could see that BT has moved away from that model and was thinking more as a software and services company rather than a phone company.”

His in-depth thoughts are worth a read for anyone interested in learning more about the redefinition of telephony and data services. Thanks to Jon for good insights on the Ribbit-BT partnership. We look forward to working with our developers as our shared vision takes shape.

Tags: BT, Developers, Partnership

Ribbit at Flashforward: The Crowd Goes Wild

August 29th, 2008 by Don Thorson | located in API, Chuck Freedman, Conferences, Developers, Platform, Uncategorized | No Comments » | trackback

Flashforward isn’t your ordinary conference…and that the crowd at last week’s show agreed that Ribbit isn’t your ordinary platform.

Flashforward 2008 followed on the heels of 360|Flex, a key conference for developers who work with Adobe Flex. Team Ribbit made a big showing at 360|Flex, hosting the full-house Summer Spawn developer workshop and gaining great accolades for their presence at the show.

But Flashforward took it to a whole new level. Calling on Flash developers to “Ignite Your Passion,” Flashforward brought Ribbit’s Director of Developer Platform Charles Freedman to center stage, asking him to share Ribbit with a packed house of 800 designers and developers—people from household-name enterprises to highly-focused design and development boutiques.

Here’s Chuck on stage at Flashforward.

You can see Chuck’s slides from the presentation here.

One thing this diverse crowd had in common was its excitement about Ribbit. Chuck’s show update sounded more like news from a concert tour than a tech conference. A throng of Flash programmers waited offstage for him, pressing close as he exited the speaker room and swapping questions, contact information, ideas—all with a vision for what Ribbit could bring to their business.

From using banner ads to spark customer call-ins to new ways of bringing sales reps closer to Web offers, the Flash crowd caught the Ribbit magic and saw the reasons to put our platform into action in their development work. Things like minimizing the steps between Web activity and call center conversations, direct response to banners, and other ways of engaging customers in connecting with offers seemed to pull developers right in our direction.

Another highlight from the show came when the Flashforward organizers asked Chuck to lead a lunchtime workshop. The competition for this crowd’s time was stiff: beautiful San Francisco weather and a great venue (Nob Hill) for sightseeing, along with several other workshop opportunities.

Ribbit packed the house, attracting a full 10% of conference participants to a crowded meeting room, filling it to the point where those who didn’t arrive early had to be turned away. We’re sorry that we couldn’t go hands-on with everyone, but we’ll remember the interest as we plan for future events.

In the meantime, if you want to learn more about how Ribbit works, these videos from our recent Spawn developer workshop break it down into easy steps.

Tags: flashforward Chuckstar developer platform

The Ripple Effect: Only the Beginning

July 30th, 2008 by Don Thorson | located in Ribbit | 1 Comment » | trackback

Announcing our acquisition by BT brought the expected tsunami of response, which we loved—and it also brought some more subtle and insightful responses from literally around the globe. We really liked watching people jump into the conversation about open telephony, the “talkification” of the web, and the growth of Ribbit’s platform into the international arena.

Blog posts, Twitter updates, and conversations with the media and industry partners—all gave us proof that our community really understands where this Ribbit/BT synergy is leading.

It also showed us, once again, how much value this community will add as we continue to grow.

We’re sharing just a few links below in hopes that you’ll take a look.

UK blogger Jon Moss discovered Ribbit through Twitter yesterday, and after learning about what we do, had a lot to say about Ribbit and Amphibian.

Adobe’s Ryan Stewart stopped by the office and talked with Chuck Freedman about what our news means to the Flash community. We even filmed it; watch it here.





C|Net News responded with three insightful articles; all are worth reading but you can start with Marguerite Reardon’s perspectives on open development. In one of the first commentaries on the acquisition, Mashable had strong thoughts, too.

What about you? What have you heard or thought about the Ribbit/BT partnership, and what would you like us to know? Comment here. We look forward to the conversation.

Don Thorson
VP of Marketing 

Tags: Amphibian, BT, cnet, developer platform, Developers, marguerite reardon, mashable, open development, Ribbit, Voice, voice 2.0

Ribbit + BT. The Future of Communication Starts Today.

July 29th, 2008 by Ted Griggs | located in Ribbit, SaaS | 2 Comments » | trackback

Today we’re sharing the great news that Ribbit has been acquired by BT one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services. This marks the most important day yet in Ribbit’s history. As part of BT will be able to more quickly extend our vision beyond Silicon Valley and bring our products and technology to the entire world. We couldn’t be more excited than to announce this new partnership.

Why would we agree to be acquired so soon after our December, 2007 launch? The answer is easy. In these seven busy months, we’ve learned from our customers and partners that our market opportunities are bigger than we had imagined and that aligning with a large-scale partner was the most direct route to building the Ribbit vision.

BT expressed an early interest in Ribbit and we’ve spent months getting to know one another. The teams at both Ribbit and BT deeply believe that our collaboration will serve our developers, the people who use our products and services, our partners and even the global communications industry. We like the idea of “rethinking communications” with a partner as strategic and visionary as BT. You can read more about that direction here. We will be sharing more details on this partnership, and introducing you to some key people on the BT team, here on this blog in the next few days—so please stay tuned.

Please join in our enthusiasm and excitement for this new partnership, and accept our thanks for the support you have shown to Ribbit so far. Both the Ribbit and BT teams promise to do all in our power to bring you the communications solutions you’ll need and want as this exciting space continues to evolve.

The best is yet to come!

Ted Griggs, Co-Founder and CEO

Tags: British Telecom, BT, communication, Ribbit, ribbit for salesforce, ted griggs, Voice, voip