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The business essentially provided a platform for web developers to add phone services into their sites: a suite of APIs that could potentially help them incorporate the likes of Skype, Google Voice and so on simply and easily. This made some sense for BT, which is Britain’s largest telecom operator and was desperate to claw back some ground in internet voice. But even so, there was plenty of skepticism.

On this site, Om called it pretty bluntly. “BT has always been long on promise, but short on execution of its grand vision,” he wrote about the deal. Meanwhile Tom Foremski at ZDNet called it “blackmail innovation”.

Today, those concerns seem to have come full circle, with the news that Ribbit is effectively shutting down most of its public-facing operations in just a couple of months.

In an email sent out to customers, Ribbit gave 60 days notice of a service shutdown and said it would be focusing on providing internal technology for BT in the future:

“Thank you for your participation in the Ribbit developer program over the past few years. We recently changed our business objectives to focus our efforts on voice technology for our parent company, BT Group, and have decided to discontinue support and external access to our voice platform, SDKs and APIs.”

As Venturebeat’s report on the news suggests, users are now being directed to switch to Twilio, a rival service that provides similar tools and has done well over the last few years. It’s a great win for Twilio, since even though it’s not obvious exactly how many Ribbit users there were, or how many will switch, it is essentially free customer acquisition for them.

So what happened?

The reality is that this move has been a long time coming.

The acquisition deal was in part architected by BT’s chief scientist at the time, JP Rangaswami, who brought in some of his own team to help Ribbit really try and gain traction. But last year Rangaswami jumped ship to Salesforce and taking some staff — such as former VP of Web Services Kevin Marks — with him.

Without a champion, it seems that pressure was coming to bear on the business. As a result, rumors of some big strategic shifts were afoot last year, with Opus Research reporting that the business was being brought in-house. That is, that Ribbit was being changed from an outward-facing, developer resource into a set of tools used internally at BT to build products that it could sell to customers. When there was an exodus of staff at many levels earlier this year, including co-founders Crick Waters and Ramani Narayan, it became fairly clear this is what was going on.

Bringing Ribbit inside BT means that while it isn’t exactly dead as an idea — it will live on inside the larger company, after all — it is pretty much dead as a product. True, the company still operates in two other sub-categories: Ribbit Mobile, a suite of consumer products for cellphone users that has been in beta for some time, and a service that hooks into Salesforce, and the notice to customers is swift to point out that they aren’t affected by this shutdown (“this notice only refers to Ribbit Developers and does NOT impact Ribbit Mobile or Ribbit for Salesforce users”, it says).

Update: A BT spokeswoman tells us there are no plans to shutter those services.

“Ribbit technology is pivotal to BT’s voice technology strategy, and we have been integrating it into the business since we purchased the company … we are integrating Ribbit into a number of services to provide our customer facing teams in BT Retail, BTGS and BT Wholesale the ability to sell and market services that utilise underlying Ribbit technology.

We can confirm that Ribbit is closing its developer programme to concentrate on future voice technology for BT Group. However, users of existing Ribbit services such as Ribbit for Mobile and Ribbit for Salesforce are not affected in any way and we are in fact hiring in Mountain View.

But the truth is that despite what they say, things aren’t looking too healthy there, either. The last post on the Ribbit Mobile forum is a plaintive cry from late last year of a user who worries that there haven’t been any updates.

And ultimately, whatever happens, the fact is that the business can’t ever really live up to its full potential — or the acquisition price — if it’s only ever operating inside its parent company. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard on them: after all, the Ribbit deal was made just as we all teetered on the brink of the full-blown financial crisis: the world is a very different place now than it was then.

Photography used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user GoingSlo

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The developers call Ringio a “new approach for call collaboration.” Borrowing from call center technology, when a call comes in, users are presented with a real-time popup showing data about the caller, so that one can decide whether to take the call, redirect the caller to voicemail, or to another team member. The information presented goes far beyond caller ID, however, and includes details such as who the caller last spoke to, what previous calls were missed, and notes about the caller from colleagues. The desktop app uses an Adobe AIR interface, which I generally don’t like, but Ringio’s app is quite attractive.

Ringio includes several team collaboration tools, including a shared corporate address book, the ability to easily share contact information and call history among team members. Ringio also includes systems for showing the availability of team members, share call-handling responsibilities, and send instant messages between team members.

Ringio also offers an Android application (which I haven’t tried) that allows users to hold, transfer, redirect and deflect calls while on the road. The app offers access to calls, voicemails, contacts, notes and other team members, and it synchronizes in real time with the desktop app. iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and mobile web apps are on the way.

Administrators can customize Ringio through a web app that allows creation of sophisticated call routing. If desired, one can get rid of the “phone tree” and substitute something like “I see you talked to Charlie when you called us last; would you like to speak with him again?” I suspect that some of my customers would find this creepy; others would appreciate the time savings.

Ringio has some other nice features. It can be used together with an existing PBX system and, next month, it will be possible to terminate calls on VoIP systems using URIs (the phone equivalent of an email address). It also seamlessly syncs with Google Contacts (something that Ribbit Mobile — the closest competitor to Ringio that I’ve seen — still can’t do), and with Zoho CRM, Salesforce.com, Highrise, and SugarCRM. Ringio also offers features that are pretty standard among VoIP phone systems, including voicemail; call rejection and blocking; a “Find Me” redirect system; Caller ID that always shows your office number, even when on the road; availability of local and toll-free numbers; and number porting.

Pricing starts at $99 per month for four users, plus $25 per month for each additional user. The basic plan includes a pool of 2,000 incoming and outgoing minutes; with each additional user, the company pool increases by 500 minutes. Additional minutes are billed at 5 cents each. A free trial is available.

Have you used Ringio? Let us know your thoughts on the service.

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While the offering appears to be a worthy competitor to Google Voice, it also underscores BT’s larger strategy of merging its voice business with the Internet. BT acquired Ribbit in a $105 million deal last year and installed Ribbit founder Ted Griggs as chief technology officer of BT Voice in an attempt to expand beyond traditional cellular telephone service into alternative forms of communication.

BT’s strategy is one that is surely being studied by savvy network operators around the world. Consumers are increasingly turning to web-based services such as Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging to communicate with others, and Skype’s 40 million-plus daily users prove that Internet voice has gained mass-market traction. Voice still accounts for the vast majority of revenues for carriers around the world, but operators will have to embrace alternative forms of communication as the Internet collides with the traditional mobile industry. Whether Ribbit Mobile can overtake Google Voice has yet to be determined, but BT’s strategy of embracing Internet-based communications is refreshingly progressive in the conservative world of mobile telecoms.

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Fast-forward to today and BT has fully embraced the new communications reality, one that goes beyond mere voice calls. And to show how serious it is, the company has made Ribbit founder Ted Griggs the chief technology officer of BT Voice.

When I caught up with him on the phone last week, I asked him about the bold move by BT to put someone like him in charge. To some insiders, that might seem like letting the inmates run the asylum, Griggs quipped. Ribbit, if you remember, was started about three years ago with the promise of bringing together web and voice using a new kind of a platform, one that was able to take inputs from different communication tools — XMPP, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, MSN and Flash Media Server –- and make them talk to their “switch.”

More Than Just Voice

JP Rangaswami, managing director of service design at BT who was recently named BT’s chief of digital communications, has championed Griggs’s ascension to his new role. Griggs has always believed that when it comes to service providers, thinking about communications as just voice doesn’t cut it, which is why Ribbit’s products merge traditional notions of communications with web applications and extend them. In other words, voice is viewed as just another API that can be used to enhance a user’s experience. Ribbit for Salesforce and Ribbit for Oracle are two examples of voice and the web coming together, said Griggs.

BT’s big bet is good news for like-minded startups such as TringMe and Twilio, which are also seeking that elusive pot of gold based on the voice-web marriage premise. Now might be their time. Why? Because the very notion of communications is changing. As Alec Saunders, CEO of iotum, writes:

Let’s instead change the conversation –- acknowledge that the carrier network is a platform, and that the carrier has a need for an application community, and begin the dialog between network partners and developers about the ability for those operators to help us get to market.

The New Dial Tone

Indeed, people are increasingly using different modes of communication, from Facebook to Skype to Twitter to SMS, and carriers need to embrace such a change. That means they need to offer new kinds of services, such as voice-to-text, asynchronous messaging, asymmetric voice and low-cost dialing.

In other words, carriers will have to stop thinking like resellers of boxes and more like software-based network operators. Juniper Networks CEO Kevin Johnson recently started talking about how the next evolution of the Internet is going to be less about router and switches and more about software. His company has made its money selling routers to operators, so he does have an idea as to how operators are thinking.

Carriers Do It Best

Large carriers have many things going for them: global infrastructure, deep pockets and the ability to sell to larger companies. Innovative VoIP startups, on the other hand, have the right ideas, but don’t have the footprint or the resources to grow, Griggs said. To that end, he added, “We are doing what we were doing at Ribbit at a much larger scale at BT.” Carriers provide the nuts and bolts including the software platform, and developers do the rest, he said. (Related post: Is There Money in Voice APIs?)

But again, in order to do that, carriers need to change their thinking –- much in the same way that Salesforce.com did with CRM, Skype with voice and Google with advertising. For BT, Ribbit is trying its best. Will it succeed? Let’s wait and see!

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Basically, VoicePHP is intended to do the same things as VoiceXML, but by using the familiar PHP programming methology. In doing so, it wants to attract a large pool of PHP-savvy developers and have them develop voice applications. (See how it works.) This is an even simpler approach than the one floated by Ribbit, a Silicon Valley-based company that was acquired by British Telecom in July 2008 for $105 million. Ribbit is betting on the large-scale adoption of Flash and hopes its Flash-centric solution would become the engine that powers web-voice applications.

The idea of VoicePHP seems disruptive in its simplicity. As TringMe puts it on the VoicePHP web site, “With VoicePHP, there’s no need to learn a new markup language, tags, attributes associated with VoiceXML. Widely and Freely available tools for developing, debugging PHP can be continued to use with VoicePHP.” It also means that an application written in VoicePHP can be accessed via Flash, instant messenger (like Google Talk), Mobile VoIP clients or even plain old phone lines. This gives TringMe an advantage over rivals that require Flash.*

VoicePHP also squares off against Twilio, a startup that allows developers to write apps that tap into Twilio’s backend to talk to any kind of phone. Twilio’s simpler version of VoiceXML allows developers to offer some core voice-related functions and helped it attact 1,000 or so developers during the first three days following its launch in late November 2008. Some of them are already using the service in an interesting ways. Voice(sneak) and Dwellicious are two such examples.

Twilio’s approach seemed simpler than the application programming interface (API) tactics that have been tried by others; VoIP companies offering APIs to their platforms have struggled to attract developers to their platforms. Although some VoIP services such as Phweet and iotum’s Calliflower are using TringMe’s API, the company is hoping that VoicePHP will remove all the complexity associated with API-based solutions.

VoicePHP goes well beyond the API paradigm and integrates voice into the language itself. One continues to use the same development, testing tools and implements PHP code as he is used to. There is no need to invoke special “vendor-specific” APIs.

Of course, TringMe isn’t doing this out of the goodness of its heart. It is betting that as VoicePHP grows popular, more and more web-voice application developers would use its VoIP platform, in turn helping TringMe earn money.

* If you are a VoIP developer and can offer your insights, I would appreciate your help. You can leave your thoughts in the comments area or email me using the contact form.

PS: GigaOM readers will get 50 beta invites for the hosted platform which will include one US phone number and phone credits to test the service. You can signup with TringMe & mention GigaOM. Their voice application will be immediately available from Flash, IM, Phone etc.

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Gorilla in the Greenhouse fires on all cylinders: It teaches complex issues in a digestible way; it shows the characters taking practical action; and it even goes a little deeper, teaching kids to not buy into the hype about something just because it calls itself green, but to really learn about what’s going on behind the scenes. More episodes are due for 2009, but there’s plenty on the site for kids to run with in the way of extra info and projects in the meantime.

Green themes for kids are cropping up all over online. National Geographic Kids has created a web home for the Canadian series Iggy Arbuckle, about a pig forest ranger protecting the ecosystem of his park with the help of his beaver friend, Jiggers. There’s also Meet the Greens, a series about an eco-conscious family made by WGBH, the people behind PBS favorites like Masterpiece Theatre and ZOOM. Each, like the best of kid’s television, provides fun for children while bringing wisdom and wit that adults can enjoy, too.

There are also tons of sites with adorable eco-educational animated games. Waterbusters! actually taught me several things about how to stem the tap at home; GreenCity lets teachers hook into what remains of the Sim craze while actually, you know, teaching stuff; and Charlie and Lola: Look After Your Planet features the cutest, most polite, most precious recycling animated British children you’ve ever seen. (And their dog Sizzles, too.)

Even the most cynical Al Gore pooh-pooh-er wouldn’t argue in favor of a giant swirling eddy of plastic bags in the Pacific Ocean. Yet these sites and series aren’t political. Rather they’re a fun way to get kids thinking about the part they play in the environment. And adults may learn a thing or two along the way, too.

Hey, we could all stand to be greener gorillas, couldn’t we?

This review, along with more details about the show, can be found at NewTeeVee Station.

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In what seems like another addition to a long list of examples of how when you rent digital content, you’re actually renting it with a strict set of conditions, Apple owners are running into trouble with High Definition Content Protection (HDCP). The problem, affecting owners of the new aluminum MacBooks and MacBook Pro, occurs when you try to play some iTunes-rented movies on an external display attached to your notebook.

The HDCP causing the problem is intended to prevent copying high-def content across an HDMI connection. It’s also included in DisplayPort tech, which is the new standard for video output on current generation Mac portable computers. According to Ars Technica, the problem seems to affect movies protected by Apple’s FairPlay Version 3 DRM, although not all files which have Version 3 protection are affected. Whether or not the movie plays appears to be somewhat random, at least in Ars’ limited sample pool.

The person who pointed out the problem to Ars was just trying to play Hellboy 2 for a class of high school students using an external projector. Another case reported in an Apple support discussion thread occurred when a MacBook owner tried to playback content to his external 19-inch monitor. This report was quickly joined by many, many others. In all cases, playback works fine on the computer’s built-in display.

Is there a fix?

Is this another issue to be resolved quickly and with relatively little stir, like the trackpad hard-click recognition problem? Likely not, since a fix in this case might open up rental HD content to potential piracy. A software solution would take more time and attention to preserve HDCP integrity while allowing proper use for those who rented content and have no intentions of copying the content.

That’s not to say that Apple can let this one pass. One of the great incentives to even rent movies through iTunes is the ability to play it back on your HDTV or projector. If new MacBook owners (who represent a very sizeable group) feel like they’re playing Russian roulette when they rent content from iTunes, they’d simply stop doing it. And those caught unaware will go back to Apple for some kind of compensation and possibly swear off the service for good. Some angry MacBook owners are already seeing this as a ploy to get people to buy AppleTVs. This is probably not the case, but even the impression that it might be is damaging.

In a time when many are turning to their computers as home theater supplements and substitutes, Apple would do well to nip this in the bud right away. Since some movies do and some don’t encounter the HDCP problem, it may be a studio issue and out of their hands. If it is, they’ll have to lobby the studios, paint a picture of lost revenue, and hope to pressure a switch in the encoding of affected movies.

What do you say? Does this HDCP mess have you looking to jump the iTunes ship, or do you trust in an Apple fix?

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That is one of the reasons the company was able to snag $18 million in Series C funding from Vantage Point Partners and previous investors including Kennet Venture Partners, NorthCap Partners and EDF Ventures. The new round is incredible because of its timing — though I am betting that the new investors are looking at the $105 million Ribbit exit and letting their imagination run wild. But then there aren’t many suckers like BT around anymore! The company has raised (including this round) a total of $35.5 million since its inception in 2003.

Thanks to its own voice peering fabric, IntelePeer is on its way to doing close to 7 billion minutes of voice traffic this year, Chairman and CEO Frank Fawzi told me yesterday. “We are a lot larger than Ribbit and Jajah by multiple times,” Fawzi quipped. Jajah is heading down the same path at IntelePeer and the two companies are poised to become fierce competitors — that is if Jajah makes it out on the other end of this downturn.

So why does IntelePeer need the money? “We only just turned EBDITA positive and we need to support our expansion,” Fawzi claimed. Of course, I never expected him to say that he was buying insurance — his investors wouldn’t like that. Plus, it’s prudent to take this money right now. As we all know, downturns are as unpredictable as the tornadoes in the Midwest — and leave just as much destruction in their wake.

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Second, think about your startup and what you are trying to do with your particular mashup. There are several startups here trying to pull aspects of sites together to make information consumption easier. However, how long will the owners of such sites let another site or service make money pulling their content out of context and serving ads against it? Ironically, it’s a similar disruption that TiVo or Slingbox brought to television, now being perpetrated against online content providers. This should be an interesting battle to watch, if such mashups gain in popularity.

Finally, a bunch of the services being launched are features rather than businesses (this includes all of the wicked cool tool bars I’ve seen.) I don’t want to be a pessimist, however, because there were some some products and startups that really stood out. These are some of the booths I rushed to after the presentations:

• Fusion I/O– Basically this company is adding a controller and software to commodity Flash to make really fast and big storage for servers. They’ve added a PCI Express slot that allows for 10 Gigabit Ethernet transport of data between the storage and the servers, and HP is designing it into servers, while IBM is designing it into storage products. This product could be a key attribute for pushing content delivery and cloud computing as close to real time as possible.
• Plastic Logic– Everyone loves this thin (see photo) plastic reader, and the company says it has a factory opening next week ready to churn out the plastic electronics on which this reader is built. They also say that the plastic is 40 percent cheaper than building electronics displays in silicon. But they don’t plan to license the technology to other partners. Seriously? Unless the reader is sub-$100, I can’t figure out why you would waste such cool technology and build and entire factory for one, high-end device. It’s like inventing chocolate and restricting it for use in chocolate chips, or wanting to control chocolate forever.
• Arsenal Interactive — A fellow blogger called it useless, but this Ribbit-like platform connects the telephone to the web using robo-calling and software. I found the HeyCosmo applications, which allow me to set a question or task and then give me answers in a minute or so, pretty useful. It’s also ripe for advertising, and the CEO showed me some emails he received from small businesses who received the robotic calls and wanted to talk about advertising. The difficulty will be establishing rating systems for the services displayed and figuring out how to sell what is essentially local advertising without employing too many people.
• Infovell– As a journalist, I spend a lot of time researching things and know that I pay for access to quality information. If Infovell’s technology can really scan the web that’s left uncrawled by Google’s algorithms and provide more than the current medical, technology and law databases, then there is a market for the service.
• Awind (mobiShow)– I know there are a million devices attempting to bridge the web and the PC, but Awind’s home entertainment box connects my PC to the TV via a Wi-Fi connection and offers watchable web content today. The box contains software that improves the resolution of the web content when blown up on the television. I still found it a bit fuzzy, but that could be the crappy monitor they brought to the show.

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