With BT's $105 million cash acquisition of Ribbit this week, there's a large focus on the telecom industry and developer community, as this is a major milestone for both ends of the spectrum. Having already established itself with platform initiatives thanks to vast investment in its 21st Century Network (21CN), BT was quite focused on its growth potential as a more open global network, working closely with developers.
As Ribbit also has a large focus on the developer community for its telephony software, the client-side approach was rather attractive to UK-based BT as it addressed the portion of the market that BT had set its sights towards, but hadn't been able to target. In combining these two aspects of progressive telephony companies, both with similar visions of the integrated future of voice, there's an invariable amount of attention being spent on the capabilities of voice as a feature, not an application. The acquisition of Ribbit became a direct response to innovation coming from Apple and Google Android, both of which have a certain reliance on a marketplace where applications can be delivered directly to consumers.
What we haven't seen from Apple or other telephony companies, however, is a highly integrated use of voice as a feature, which can, in the words of J.P. Rangaswami, Managing Director of Design, BT, "enrich our experiences." Rangaswami likened BT's goals for voice features to developments we've seen in the image-sharing industry.
Years ago, it was cumbersome to share digital images, but now we have auto time stamps and geo-tagging options, all of which are device-agnostic to a certain extent, and can easily be expanded upon with mobile devices and Web applications. So too can voice become part of the enrichment of existing concepts we see on devices and Web applications, so you'll have a more fluid experience with anything you already have concerning voice.
Chuck Freedman, director of the developer platform at Ribbit, hopes that the developer community will be excited about "what BT brings to Ribbit in terms of features." They can "continue developing their existing applications and add new features for the creation of Flash or AIR desktop applications, or Netvibes and Google Desktop widgets that allow others to call you directly, and have your voicemails transcribed and delivered to your email or mobile device via SMS," said Freedman.