Kevin Krejci's List: Ribbit Related

•  米Cable LabsのPacket Cableに準拠し
   IP電話サービスを提供するのに最適なソフトスイッチ

• February 02, 2005 

     

  Troubled softswitch vendor Syndeo Corp. is down to a skeleton crew and is seeking alternatives that could lead to a sale of its assets.
• "We essentially are reassessing our plans," Griggs told CED, noting that Syndeo will continue to support its MSO customers in Japan, which combined serve about 50,000 VoIP customers. He said Syndeo has enough cash to get through the rest of 2005.
• With well-established vendors such as Siemens, Nortel Networks and Cisco joining the mix with deployable softswtich products, the U.S. "was no longer a place for a startup [call management server] supplier," Griggs said.

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• The trials and tribulations of Adobes secretive Pacifica project are nicely covered over at Gigaom.com. Pacifica is the secretive flash based audio and video flash player Adobe has been cooking up since September last year. The Adobe flash player is capable of near HD performance which has the internet video world excited, but equally significant is that it will double as a VoIP player.
• Nearly 15 months later there is still no sign of the product and as Adobe inches forward there is a whole raft of companies already building VoIP applications. Tring me, Ribbit and Pudding me are three newbies all angling to be a preferred flash player in the next generation of players.
• Adobe's model is to build an application/reader and then make money from the server side.

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• • Pacifica is built on top of the open standard SIP protocol.
    
  • Our first mission is to maintain the highest quality voice experience possible, pushing the boundaries of the Flash Platform.
    
  • Right now, Pacifica enables point-to-point (P2P) transmission of the media channel once the connection is established via our servers.
  • We are dedicated to a complete P2P solution going forward, to eliminate the complex server back end and configuration needed with most VoIP technologies.
• Going forward, we have the following agenda, in no particular order:
  
  • Enable Video over IP
  • Enable support for AIR applications
  • Enable connections to traditional phone networks (aka PSTN termination)
  • Provide support for text messaging
  • Improve our model for Presence and availability
  • Bake in some advanced firewall and NAT traversal techniques

• there are indeed 300 million non-PC devices (eg: handsets, phones, etc.) that are enabled with Flash and that Adobe anticipates that number to reach 1 billion by 2010
• • 85% of all handsets that are shipping in Japan and more than 90% of all new DoCoMo handsets are Flash enabled.
   
  • DoCoMo has a total of 52.9M subs, generated 1.8 Billion US$ in revenue for the Flash Lite download service and 600M in incremental, annualized revenue for i-channel – DoCoMo’s Flash Cast service. (as of April ‘07)
   
  • i-channel passed 10M subs in April – less than 18 months after service launch.
   
  • More than 70% of Flash devices are now shipping outside of Japan.
   
  • Verizon is now selling 13 Flash enabled handsets and will launch their Flash Cast service in the U.S. by the end of this year.
   
  • Flash UIs in popular phones include the LG Chocolate, the LG Prada and the Samsung D900, which won best in show at 3GSM ‘07.
   
  • Adobe partners with the top 6 and vast majority of the top 20 OEMs including Nokia, SEMC, Samsung, LG, and Motorola.
   
  • Adobe partners with key operators including Verizon, DoCoMo, China Mobile, Chungwha, and Telenor and has many other trials under way.
• The day I’m waiting for is when we can simply skin our phones so that you and I can have the exact same Flash-based phones but with completely different UIs. Given what LG has done with the Prada, it’s hard to imagine a world where you couldn’t do this.

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• 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, there will be thousands of new phone apps appearing soon, and they almost all will be Flash apps. In other words, these won’t be stand-alone pieces of software like Skype. They will let people make calls right from the browser and tie deeply into other apps and data on the Web.
• Ribbit recently closed a $10 million B round led by Allegis Capital, with KPG Ventures participating.
• Already, about 600 developers have built Ribbit apps under certain restrictions (they are not allowed to go live on the Web until early next year). These apps range from an Adobe AIR iPhone that can make calls from your computer to a Flash phone with a chalkboard interface to a browser-based phone that works inside Salesforce.com
• Ribbit handles the calls and other voice-related services (call logs, voice messages, speech-to-text transcription,contact imports, directories, provisioning, billing, security, authentication) and provides the APIs to developers, who build their apps with Adobe’s Flex development tools.
• (Ribbit does not support Ajax apps because Ajax does not let you access the computer’s microphone, says Griggs, but he might consider extending support to Silverlight, which does).
• Instead of developing a custom call-center application for $250,000, for instance, an entrepreneur could build the same thing for much less on Ribbit and charge, say, $5 a month per customer service rep (with Ribbit taking $1.50).
• At its core, Ribbit has built a telephone switch in software, known as a soft switch. It works just like a switch made by Lucent or Nortel. Except that it is software running on hosted Linux servers.
• The Ribbit phone created as a demo for Salesforce.com, for instance, will not only let sales people make calls to prospects directly from the browser-based CRM application. It will also log the call. And in the next release, it will be able to record portions of a call at a click of the button and transcribe it (Ribbit uses speech-to-text technology from SimulScribe)
• In the future you might call a friend and hear, “Press 1 to leave a private message, Press 2 to leave a message on my FunWall.”
• Ribbit has big ambitions. If it can deliver on half of them, it just might become Silicon Valley’s first phone company.

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