The Atlanta-based startup has developed technology that rapidly identifies the person calling on the phone, the type of phone used and the location where the call originates and other qualities. It can also check calls against the company’s growing database of more than a million phone numbers and more than 40,000 unique “fingerprints” used in cases of phone fraud.

On Wednesday, the company announced $11 million in an Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Citi Ventures, with contributions from Redpoint Ventures, Felicis Ventures and Webb Investment Network. To date Pindrop has now secured a total of $12 million in venture funding.

Based on a total of 147 variables, Pindrop determines how risky a call might be on a scale of 0 to 100 so call center and contact center employees can act accordingly. A customer can use that information to determine who should take the call. For example, a call with a risk code of 90 might well get routed to a call center’s fraud-investigation team.

But static ratings aren’t good enough. It’s critical to improve Pindrop’s machine-learning algorithms, partly by asking people to tell if calls that the system identified as fraudulent turns out to be actually fraudulent.

Since its establishment in 2011, Pindrop has signed some big customers, including two major banks and a popular online brokerage, said Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO and co-founder.

Balasubramaniyan, right, with Paul Judge, Pindrop’s executive chairman. Source: Pindrop Security

Meanwhile, the specter of trouble from the telephone has heightened lately with developments such as Wired writer Mat Honan’s password disaster to the rise of to swatting prank calls.

Andreessen partner Scott Weiss joins the board. Weiss has security cred, as he co-founded enterprise security company IronPort Systems before Cisco bought it and Weiss held security leadership positions for the networking giant.

In a post scheduled to run Wednesday on his blog, Weiss noted that Pindrop’s interest in the “voice fraud” area was one reason he’s eager to work with Pindrop. “Voice is becoming an even more attractive alternative for fraudsters as the online channel is maturing and becoming more secure,” Weiss wrote.

While the term voice-fraud does have an unusual ring to it, security startups in general have been cashing in on heavy investor interest in recent months, partly driven by reports of cyberattacks. Pindrop might have a niche on its hand, but from a broad perspective it ought to be viewed as yet another beneficiary of the rising IT-security wave.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user dno1967b.

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I spent some time talking to Dane Jasper, the CEO of Sonic.net about how he plans to take on the incumbents, the cost of a fiber build out and the natives of a city that already have sued to stop AT&T from building out fiber to the node broadband. We also touched on caps and why Jasper can’t see himself offering businesses gigabit services in the near future.

They may be rivals but Sonic.net and AT&T share a common enemy.

When it comes to building out infrastructure, from broadband to roads, someone, be it environmentalists or neighbors leery of the project’s components, are bound to raise a fuss. When it comes to better broadband, the cabinets holding the electronics raise the ire of residents who would rather not have refrigerator-sized boxes on their lawns. For example, residents of San Francisco have banded together to sue to stop AT&T’s planned U-verse deployment, which requires more than 700 cabinets to hold the electronics gear be placed around the city.

Jasper says because Sonic.net is deploying fiber to the home, he will use fewer cabinets (he estimates 188) but he’s still worried that San Franciscans will step up to hold up or halt his permits. AT&T originally had received its permits, but those permits were halted by the court while this suit goes forward.

Jasper is worried that the suit could take another three to six months, and will hold up his deployment, but he’s hoping that fewer cabinets and a willingness to share Sonic.net’s infrastructure with other providers might make city residents view his cabinets with a bit more favor. After all, instead of building new cabinets, competitors interested in the market could share space in the existing boxes. Jasper understands that cabinets aren’t ideal, but he’s also hoping that if he plays it straight with the city, he can convince them that fiber-to-the-home is worth the potential of a couple hundred eyesores.

The Economics of broadband and fiber to the home.

The Sonic.net employees. Look for them in your neighborhood, San Francisco.

Meanwhile, Jasper declined to disclose his costs for providing fiber to the home in San Francisco, but he did say the fiber deployed would be a mix of aerial and underground cabling. Aerial deployments are cheaper because there’s less labor associated with stringing the cable. Jasper said he hasn’t chosen vendors yet, but he is currently using ADTRAN, Clearfield and Corning in the fiber-to-the-home build out he’s building in Sebastopol, Calif. Sonic.net is profitable as a company, and has been in business for 17 years.

The question is if Jasper can keep Sonic.net in the black while building out and selling fiber to the home to consumers for $70 a month. Sonic.net today offers two products in most markets, a $40 ADSL service with one phone line and a $70 a month 40 Mbps bonded DSL service with two phone lines. Replacing the copper with fiber adds costs, but Jasper plans to keep the rate the same. Sonic.net’s well known for declining to cap its broadband service and for adding a variety of services to its bundle without charging more. Jasper says, “fundamentally we recognize that as a competitive service provider we need massively differentiated products and we have done that with our fusion copper products and uncapped service.”

But, as Jasper says, “we recognize that copper is not a long term solution ten to 20 years from now and it’s logical to build fiber out.” So while there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation to building out fiber in terms of the customer demand not necessarily being there right away, Jasper believes that the demand will come and he can deliver the capacity and afford the build out. Jasper is using ist Sabastopol buildout to help model the costs and demand for fiber in San Francisco.

Why businesses won’t get Sonic.net’s Fusion products anytime soon.

No caps and no meters for Sonic.Net

To help keep costs in line, the fiber links are for consumer accounts only, at least so far. Jasper has been an ardent foe of broadband caps, where ISPs place a limit on the amount of data a customer can use each month. However, when it comes to delivering broadband to businesses, he recognizes that a superfast gigabit connection to a business will have a very different usage pattern than one delivered to a consumer. Yet currently Sonic.net only charges businesses a bit more than residential services at $45 and $90 respectively). Under a gigabit network, that lack of price differential and the possibility for a business to use all of their connection (or even half) becomes unsustainable.

“We haven’t built our fiber past any businesses yet, and we did it intentionally,” Jasper said. “With our stance on no capping, I have a little bit of concern delivering 1 gig to a business at $89.95 and them using half of it, because that could really happen.”

Sonic.net has a decade and a half modeling usage for consumers at lower prices than rivals offer, but with businesses and their demand for broadband, Jasper says there are a lot of unknowns. For example, the lack of applications for gigabit networks probably helps Jasper here, as does the fact that most consumers typically use downlink services to consume content. And currently there’s a limit to how much they can consume, even with three or four TVs downloading or streaming HD content.

“Consumption is still constrained by the number of TVs and hard drives and even though everyone eventually has more stuff, practically speaking it really does end up normalizing down to a reasonable level,” Jasper says. He points out that the inbound bandwidth costs and middle mile bandwidth costs are getting less and less expensive, which means that customers downloading content isn’t a giant cost suck. But a business might hook a data center or several servers up on a gigabit connection and use that to send a lot of traffic out. And that could get expensive.

So for those watching U.S. broadband policy, between Google’s plans to deploy fiber to the home in both Kansas Cities, a few municipal networks, Verizon’s FiOS network and Sonic.net’s plans, we’re getting more people to a gigabit. It can be done, so let’s see what we can learn as these companies push ahead. And when others say it can’t be done, perhaps we’ll have the information that proves them wrong.

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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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Previously the company’s killer app was its hooks into the old copper-based phone system that can be expensive and complicated for smaller companies to learn to use and write to. It has gained huge success and helped open up voice for a wide variety of applications. Hulu, for example built its customer service call centers on Twilio. Now folks can add VoIP to the mix, says Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio.

“When it came to the PSTN, there are a lot of use cases where that doesn’t make sense,” Lawson said. “To use it people must bring their own device or cell plans.”

Instead, Twilio will now try to out-Skype Skype and the myriad other VoIP services out there with the added bonus of continuing to offer access to the older networks as well. So if you are on your computer shopping and you have a click-to-call button, instead of an agent calling you back, you can call using VoIP. This is cheaper for the developer that pays Twilio for access to the networks and more seamless for the shopping site’s customer. It also gives developers more options to build VoIP calling into their apps.

Late last year Twilio raised $12 million in additional funding, and it has become a hot back end provider of infrastructure, so this move makes sense. Not only is the world moving rapidly to IP but the old-school copper network that Twilio makes easier to use is also on its way out the door. Some experts believe that by 2018 it will be gone. Plus, LTE networks will be VoIP as well eventually. Twilio is just anticipating the future.

And that future isn’t voice, but apps that provide the context for the best means for communication. It may be voice, it may be video or it may be text, but Lawson (while not committing to anything beyond expressing interest in video) expects Twilio to be there on the back end enabling developers to offer communication with a minimum of fuss.

“Voice is an experience. It is more than just the mechanics of how we are communicating,” Lawson said in a phone interview. “The nature of the communication and the context of why we are communicating determines how we communicate. That’s why the apps are driving the next wave, because that’s where the context comes from.”

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Google is gearing up to do battle with Cisco and Microsoft in the unified communications market. The company recently acquired Gizmo5, a SIP-based service provider, as part of its effort to build an enterprise-quality VoIP offering. And Gizmo5′s expertise in soft clients can help Google extend its mobile reach, potentially allowing the company to offer Google Voice across a host of devices.

As the recent acquisitions of Ribbit by BT and Jajah by O2/Telefonica demonstrate, voice is increasingly being turned into an application from service providers. Those acquisitions are aimed in part at helping users communicate from their phones in a variety of ways, from traditional telephony to Internet-based services like e-mail, instant messaging, VoIP and social networks.

But while savvy carriers are beginning to acquire startups to better compete in the brave new world of web-based communication, behemoths like Google, Microsoft and Cisco are coming at the market from an application point of view. Divorcing voice from the network is liberating for consumers who could enjoy a host of ways to communicate seamlessly and efficiently, but it also opens the field to non-operators. Operators that can leverage both the Internet and their own networks to deliver optimized, personalized services will be able to compete with the players moving into telecom. Those that don’t will quickly find themselves doing nothing but shipping data over their networks.

Image courtesy Flickr user danndalf.

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These and many other topics are up for discussion at the Emerging Communications (eComm) Conference next month in Silicon Valley, California. Industry heavyweights such as Skype, Google, Yahoo!, Twitter, and more are scheduled to present at eComm; making it both an intriguing and stellar lineup.

The eComm Conference takes place March 12-14. I was able to interview Lee Dryburgh, organizer of the conference. We discuss:

• How mobile communications are about to be revolutionized
• How VoIP is just the beginning of synchronous voice communication
• Ways web workers can benefit from connected internet telephony
• How open devices and open spectrum will benefit a distributed team

Check out the 25-minute podcast below. We look forward to reading your comments.

Additionally, when you go to eComm’s website to register, use code “GIGAOM08″ for a 15% discount.

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Today Chris has some big news: his four-year-old company just landed a deal to partner with Dell to hawk its open source VoIP boxes to the PC giant’s 6 million small- and medium-sized businesses. In four years his own 40 salespeople had netted 5,000 customers. Not bad, but not Dell. In an interview for GigaOM, Chris called the deal “a company defining event.” Something every founder dreams of, in fact.

Chris has written a long post about what he learned on the march to closing with Dell:

This would be a big day for any startup anywhere — struggling to establish its credibility in an aggressive tech world full of behemoths… I can clearly remember almost four years ago – to the day – when [the] four of us working at Fonality back then were sitting around a room and hypothesizing about our plan to revolutionize telephony. (Isn’t that what all founders do when they are staring at the back of a napkin?).

How many of you are nodding right now? Chris’s piece is filled lessons, but here are the key takeaways.

Chris’ biggest lesson boils down to NOT reinventing the wheel.

Our aim back then was to build the world’s easiest-to-use and most affordable business phone system…But, we also knew that *even if we did build it* our next greatest challenge would be: reach.

We asked: “How will the whole world ever find out about our awesome new product?”
… I can tell you that it did not happen by accident — nor were we the expected choice.

Chris focused on 3 painful characteristics about his industry that gave Fonality a reason-for-being, vis a vis Dell…

1. Telecom has always been ridiculously high priced.
2. Telecom has always been ridiculously hard to use
3. Telecom has always been proprietary

In my opinion, the most unique thing that Fonality presented over the competition was item #2. Our hybrid-hosted architecture was specifically designed to take the “hard” out of telecom.

So how did Fonality do it? by building…

… “architecture [that] is a clever halfway-point between the old world of premise phone systems and the new world of hosted phone systems.”
…we liked the old premise model because it has great quality and reliability (this is because it uses the PSTN/POTS/things-birds-sit-on).
… we liked the new model of hosted telephony [VoIP] because it provides great mobility to the customer, letting them work from home, from the road, pick up voicemail in their inbox, etc.
…So, we sat down and intentionally built a model that straddled both worlds.

It was tough sometimes to explain the rationale behind Fonality’s model:

[Investors, journalists and customers] all would ask: why would you choose an approach that was exactly between the old-and-the-new?

Our answer was always simple: the old has lasted us > 50 years, it is not going away over night. Quality on the old phone network will not be surpassed by VoIP for at least 10 years. And, we all know that 10 years is plenty-enough time for a few billion-dollar telecom companies to go bankrupt and plenty-enough time for a few billion-dollar telecom companies to be birthed.

Fonality landed Dell, in part because the company didn’t try to reinvent the wheel, which helped the company expend its resources more efficiently.

Chris’s 3 Tips:
* Understand your market
* Leverage what’s there, and still working, to your benefit. (Straddle the old and new)
* Make your product the aspirin to a painful business headache.

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