BT leaps on Ribbit

UK carrier BT said Tuesday that it has acquired Silicon Valley start up Ribbit for a total of $105m in cash.

BT said the acquisition of the VoIP firm will help it catch the ‘Telco 2.0’ bandwagon, by accelerating its “strategy to transform itself into a next- generation, platform-based, software-driven services company.”

Ribbit is an open platform, which claims to enable non-telephony developers to quickly build rich voice applications and integrate them into websites, communities and applications.

At the core sits the Ribbit SmartSwitch, which is based on a Lucent-tested Class 5 softswitch and an open Flash/Flex-based API. The company said that it can connect voice from any Flash-enabled browser to the PSTN and VoIP network, as well as providing an assortment of back-office and service delivery infrastructure.

To date, developers for Ribbit have integrated voice into salesforce.com and built voice applications that run directly from Facebook or Google.

The UK carrier said it would integrate the Ribbit platform with its own Software Development Kit (SDK), enabling developers to integrate new applications with BT’s services using a single line of code.

Ted Griggs, chief executive of Ribbit, said: “The communications industry is entering a new phase. Closed networks are becoming open platforms and developers are now driving innovation. By adding Ribbit’s capability to the power of BT’s global 21CN platform, we will now be able to give the development community the tools they need to innovate on a global scale.”