BT Buys ‘Silicon Valley’s 1st Phone Company’ For £53m
The British Telecom Group have announced their acquisiton of Silicon Valley ‘Phone 2.0′ developer Ribbit for just over £50 million, in a conscious effort to speed up their expansion into software solutions and become a major player in the mobile platform game.
Ribbit is a company firmly rooted in voice based communications online, with an open platform that provides a myriad of new ways to work within existing software. For example, their Ribbit application can be added to the popular customer relations program Salesforce allowing for voice-to-text memos, call transcript logging and a ‘virtual mobile’ which allows all calls and messages to be forwarded to a laptop, allowing full functionality on the go. All in an app which can be integrated in a few minutes.
By owning such an important business in the online field, BT have placed themselves in a strong position to counter the efforts of other platforms when it comes to providing a synergy of phones and computers. It is easy to see the practical applications of adding voice chat with simple Flash widgets on a website, simple and cheap software updates as opposed to new handsets could change the world of calling overnight.
BT’s managing director of service and design, JP Rangaswami minced no words in decrying the motives of his competitors: “We could have built a device-specific platform like Apple did, we could have built a platform for creating ads - Google might call it Android but I guess we think it should be spelt Ad-droid - or we could have been like AT&T and just provided the pipes for these people to work from. But we felt telephony and software were now one and the same thing, and we wanted to be with people who had that same vision that it was going to be a converged world.” Fighting talk.
By the same token, the 5,000 odd currently developing for this platform may see their freedoms dwindle, being underneath a corporation as bureaucratic and business driven as BT. The golden handcuffs will need to be pretty loose with regards to bring a truly open platform, or Ribbit may never achieve the mass penetration desperately needs to take off. Fortunately, with a presence in over 150 countries, getting in touch with people is not a problem for BT.
A world without wires no longer seems that far away…
Source : InformationWeek