Editor’s Note: This is a guest interview by Bernard Moon, co-founder & CEO of Vidquik, a web conferencing and sales solution platform. He blogs at Silicon Moon.
I met entrepreneur Crick Waters last year after hearing just a portion of his story and his road toward Ribbit’s $105 million exit during an event in Silicon Valley. Soon afterward, I felt confident that I could learn from… → Read More
Listening to voicemails is a huge waste of time. That’s why apps that transcribe your voicemail to text are a godsend. The new Yap Voicemail app is now available for the iPhone. You route your voicemails through Yap. It transcribes them for you using only speech-to-text technology (no humans), which allows it to offer the service for free (with ads at the bottom).
The transcriptions are not… → Read More
[Spain] With the rise of consumer-facing cloud telephone services, such as Google Voice and Ribbit, the call management services of traditional mobile operators are starting to look a bit long in the tooth. How long, therefore, before they roll out rival offerings of their own?
Not long, hopes Spanish MVNO fonYou, which today announced that it will begin licensing its Online Mobile Telephony… → Read More
Ever since Ribbit Mobile launched, I’ve been using it to forward my calls to Skype when I am at my computer and transcribe all of my voicemails, the text of which are then sent to me via email. It’s similar to Google Voice (which Mike uses), except you can use your existing mobile number. So I was pretty excited to hear that Ribbit Mobile now has an iPhone app which was just approved today (… → Read More
Angstro, a 2008 TechCrunch50 startup, launched with a product that socialized the content on the web by tapping into your social graph. At the Real-Time CrunchUp today the startup is launching Knx.to, a real-time search engine capability and API that looks up most recent social information about any of your friends, from their LinkedIn profile to their Flickr account to their Facebook profile.
In… → Read More
First, there was Google Voice. And all was good, and not so good. But it showed that there is a better way to manage voicemails than to listen to 15 in a row just to get to the one you care about.
Now, there is an alternative to Google Voice called Ribbit Mobile. And it too is very good. Ribbit Mobile is in private beta, but the first 500 people to sign up with the invite code “techcrunch”… → Read More
For those of you who don’t think voicemail is counterproductive, there is a new app on Facebook called Voicetag that lets you send voicemail messages to individuals or groups. This is not the first such app on Facebook (see Voicemail or TringMe), but it works with regular phones and incorporates SMS messages.
The app is very simple. You select a Facebook contact you want to leave a voice… → Read More
Skype competitor Gizmo is rolling out a Flash version of its SIP phone client. GizmoCall works entirely in the browser, much like other Flash-based phones from Ribbit (which was acquired by BT), TringMe, and others. In fact, Gizmo’s in-browser phone comes about a year too late. (But it still beat Skype).
Like Skype, you pay really low rates for calls to regular phones, while PC calls are free. → Read More
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… → Read More
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… → Read More
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… → Read More
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… → Read More
How badly do you want to be able to call your friends directly from your Facebook profile, without actually picking up your phone? A new technology company by the name of Ribbit Corp. hopes your answer to that question was anything other than “not at all,” since it showed off out a service earlier today that does just that. The technology aims to embed telephony in the software you use… → Read More
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… → Read More
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… → Read More
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