The service puts the lie to concerns that incumbent telcos would squash IP-Telephony in an effort to preserve traditional toll charges. It recognizes that multinational, multi-site companies have huge financial incentives to avoid paying the tolls and taxes associated with international calls (just like individuals have been doing for years, using Skype, Fring, Truephone or other VoIP carriers).

In addition to cost savings, BT markets OneVoice Ribbit 1.0 as a feature-rich single-number service. Each user will have a single “direct dial number” that is associated with multiple phone lines. Most commonly the list will include that person’s business line, wireless phone, residential phone or a “softphone” in Web browser. Users can designate which phones should be involved for both inbound and outbound call handling.

As for the features and functions that should be important to corporate customers. Phones (endpoints) can be added or changed by users through a Web site. In addition, there are a number of (now) time-tested features that employees will find attractive, including the ability to view call logs and manage voicemail, which includes voicemail-to-text transcriptions. Transcribed messages are delivered a text to either an email address or a mobile phone in the form of SMS. In both cases, the message includes a way to listen to the original message, in the very likely instance that transcriptions contain errors or are hard to decipher. The full list of features is available here.

BT acquired Ribbit for $105 million in July of 2008. It was an act of faith and courage bolstered by confidence that the parent company could harness the creativity of a generation of developers whose sensibilities were not borne out of the Bell System. As the list of features and functions indicate, the Ribbit crew realized early on that phones could do more, and they focused on what the old guard (like me) would call “single number/find me-follow me” offerings.

With a rich set of tools for Web services development and a general trend toward moving all sorts of media streams and activity streams into the cloud, Ribbit’s biggest challenge was to narrow the set of offerings to services that individuals would use frequently in the office, at home and in between. In this respect it is often compared to Google Voice, but the affiliation with BT and the incorporation into OneVoice means that BT’s technical salesforce can bring a BT branded solution to its customer base. That should be a clear advantage over Google, but only time will tell.

The phrase “over-the-top” suggests a level of extravagance (think of “over the top” entertainment). Yet, during the past 10 years it has become synonymous with “cheap international calls”. In 2010, I expect OTT to return to form and refer to all sorts of value-added services and innovations, whose providers take advantage of those “cheap” or “free” minutes to take VoIP “beyond customary boundaries” (which happens to be one of the Dictionary.com definitions for “over the top”). Avaya and 02 are seeing the same trend, and we can expect a stream of acquisitions, partnerships and innovative service offerings that take incumbent carriers and traditional enterprise infrastructure providers over-the-top and outside their comfort zone. Case in point: BT with Ribbit.

In answer to the question “to what end?”, the answers are coming fast-and-furious. As the community of developers grows, the set of solutions that they are bringing to market is starting to feel logarithmic. The inevitable incorporation or resources “in the cloud” accelerates deployment of high-profile applications even further. Case in point is the introduction of Ribbit for Salesforce. Hot on the heels of the introduction of Ribbit Mobile (noted below), Ribbit showcased the application described in this promotional video below:



Salespeople who spend hours on the road tracking down leads and closing sales have long been regarded as a ready-made market segment for mobile applications that streamline such processes as expense reporting and updates to CRM files. The first “speech-rec-for-road-warriors” use case I had seen was nearly ten years ago when the Voice Group at SAP demoed a speech-enabled way for travelling executives to fill-out their expense forms over the telephone. Time reporting was quick to follow. Both promised to streamline form-filling and increase accuracy. Still, even though it’s a video promo, the mashup of Ribbit’s phone functions and transcription services with Salesforce’s customer record management functions is more complete and suggests several other ways that existing databases, message stores, contact lists, customer metadata can be incorporated into solutions that make mobile users more productive and generally pleased (if not “delighted!).

Incorporating these existing objects into new solutions is the definition of “Recombinant Telephony.” Even though it is early days for the concept, the results are quite gratifying.

Among those extensions is a conference calling feature developed by Ribbit, which is characterized in this press release as a mashup of Ribbit’s RESTful API with the Wave API to promote “voice collaboration”. A more colorful description of the service appears here.

As a wholly owned subsidiary of BT, Ribbit is a well-funded lab that is dedicated to promoting mash-ups of Web services, voice and text messaging. It is better illustrated on this link from Google which makes it clear that it is a Recombinant Telephony “pure play.”