Ribbit
There is some buzz this week about a company called Ribbit. TechCrunch swallowed whole their marketing line of “Silicon Valley’s First Phone Company” while GigaOm spat it out, as he should have. Their site is slick and the service looks interesting, but they are certainly not Silicon Valley’s first phone company. Ribbit would probably counter that they are the first phone platform, but they’re not that either. Most folks think Asterisk is pretty darn good in that arena.
We built our own VoIP platform for KnowledgeBid simply because we knew exactly what we wanted (trackable calls, authentication, land line phones, no per minute fees). If Ribbit had been around 9 months ago, I’m sure we would have looked at the service, but I think that’s about as far as it would have gone. Ribbit charges for outgoing land line minutes plus a monthly service fee, whereas the KnowledgeBid platform scales and now that we’ve built it, it’s virtually free for us to use. I’m guessing many other VoIP application developers would find themselves in the same camp. Flexibility and options are cool, but if you know what you need, you might as well build it yourself if you’re in it for the long haul.
