Second set of Flash APIs made available to developers

TringMe does not have millions of subscribers yet. Over the last few months that TringMe has been in business, it has managed to sign up over 100k subs. You would normally expect a huge subscriber base prior to open APIs from a VoIP company. But there are not many choices for developers when it comes to flash phones. As of now, apart from TringMe, there is only Ribbit that offers Flash based APIs. Ribbit business model is completely different. Ribbit did not have to wait for a million downloads prior to making APIs public.

There is another difference between Ribbit and TringMe approaches. Ribbit APIs do not come entirely free. TringMe on the other hand does not charge anything to developers for using APIs.

We are beginning to see flash phones come out in the market, but to really see what they offer, you need to peel the covers off of the flash-phone and understand the technology they are using to build them. Some of them are merely a flashy representation to essentially use web to activate a call.
TringMe leverages Flash to provide telephony clients on top of its Flash widgets. Having said that, its APIs aren't merely restricted to flash. The company is trying to empower developers of Adobe Flex, AIR, Symbian S60 or even a pure web platform like PHP, AJAX to create web/mobile based voice-enabled applications. Again, this gives TringMe an edge over other platforms.

Opening the APIs for developers will not restrict the app developers to only TringMe subscribers. So even though the company has signed up just over 100k subs so far, developers will be porting over TringMe capabilities into their own services. I guess the developer program works a bit like LinkedIn: you can either develop an application that is distributed across users on LinkedIn site, or you can develop an application that gets various different feeds from LinkedIn onto your own site.

So as opposed to other developer programs out there, TringMe basically differs by being a technology enabler rather than a service provider that would sponsor a developer program to expand its own subscriber base.

Other update on TringMe: The company has web and mobile based VoIP widgets available. Web-based widgets are more accessible at this point since the company has not released its mobile VoIP app commercially yet. Also, support for SMS based callback services aren't widely available yet. Mobile VoIP app is almost ready for commercial release and the company is talking to service providers in some of the key countries to enable SMS based callback services. TringMe is also discussing private label offering with MNVOs and one large telco whose name we do not know yet.