Ribbit: Make Calls from Salesforce.com and Facebook

December 18, 2007

Editor’s note: A press release posted yesterday details the launch of the new phone service from Ribbit. Question: does anyone use the word telephony in every day conversation? I hate printing press releases like this due to their corporate speak mambo jambo but this appears to be the first piece of news on the subject.

If you have any thoughts on the service let me know as I will gladly post them.

(Reuters) - Silicon Valley start-up Ribbit Corp on Monday unveiled a technology platform that will let developers put Web telephony in everything from business software to popular social network sites such as Facebook.

As well as planning to sell its own services directly to consumers in the first quarter, Ribbit said it is working with more than 600 outside developers who are using its technology to create their own voice applications.

Ribbit software serves as an interface between anything from Web sites, e-mail and instant messaging to mobile or regular phones. Developers do not need to be telephony experts to build services with Adobe’s Flash software, which works on most computers.

“A developer can take telephony out of our sandbox and bring it to where you live,” said Crick Waters, Ribbit’s vice president for strategy and business development.

For example, he said that about four developers are using Ribbit to build services that consumers could incorporate into their personal pages on Facebook, a popular online hangout. These services could let members make and log calls and check their voicemail in transcript form without leaving Facebook.

Ribbit has already built an application that businesses will be able use within Salesforce.com Inc’s customer relationship management software. This lets workers dial clients via the Internet from within the application and automatically stores a log of client calls and voicemail transcripts alongside the rest of that client’s information.

See the full release, which details pricing for Ribbit, here.

Written by Adam Killam · Filed Under Salesforce.com News