Few thoughts on the BT/Ribbit rumour. I see only one attraction for BT to acquire Ribbit: the 4,000 strong developer community that Ribbit claims to have cultivated. But then BT is supposed to have signed up over 10,000 developers for its Web21C program.
How far these developers will be able to extend their Ribbit app over to BT’s Web21C platform, I am not so sure about. Ribbit uses former Syndeo platform as the underlying feature server. BT has a different underlying feature server. And then there is all the OSS/BSS integration work that developer programs need to sort out prior to making their APIs public. For BT Web21C, Microsoft takes care of the OSS/BSS integration. Suffice it to say, the apps may not be easily transferable.
There are several major differences is BT Web21C program and Ribbit developer program. APIs are different. BT offers .NET and Java type APIs. Ribbit provides Flash APIs mostly. Actually it could be that Flash APIs attract BT somewhat. There is a lot of momentum around Flash Communications Server right now. There are only two companies that offer Flash APIs for VoIP mashups: Ribbit and Tringme.
To conclude, BT certainly will not see in Ribbit what it has not seen before. Its Web21C is the biggest and the first telco sponsored Voice 2.0 developer program in the world. Ribbit project is fairly small in comparison. A quote from our recent report : “Since the commercial release of BT Web21C SDK in July 2007, more than 8000 software development kits (SDKs) have been downloaded, 300 production applications developed and 4500 “sandbox” applications built.”
If indeed it is the developer community that BT wants from this rumoured acquisition, it might be better off acquiring Skype (provided it has that kind of money to spend). Skype, as a commercial offering, has the biggest VoIP developer pool.