Ribbit

» see ribbit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i missed ribbit. wrong stack and wrong side of the atlantic. it was pitched at web developers who wanted to embed voice calls and sms into their own apps through a suite of APIs. that developer-tier audience was mostly bay-area startups building crm addons and rails apps in the 2007-2010 window. i was in ankara doing computer engineering work, nowhere near the flash-based voice-app scene, and would not have had a reason to click through to ribbit.com even if it had landed on my hacker news homepage.

the company was founded on 23 february 2006 by ted griggs, crick waters, peter leong and ramani narayan. based in mountain view. raised around $13 million in venture money led by alsop-louie partners with allegis capital and kpg ventures alongside. the initial platform was built on flash and adobe air, later opened up to javascript and REST. the pitch line the founders repeated was "voice as a programmable feature," which was three or four years ahead of where twilio would land the same category.

british telecom acquired ribbit on 29 july 2008 for $105 million in cash. the acquisition was announced as BT's attempt to buy developer culture wholesale, on the theory that a large british carrier could not organically hire the kind of engineers who wrote api docs for a living. the ribbit team stayed in silicon valley under the "ribbit, a bt business" branding for another three years before the closure notice landed on 10 august 2011.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pitch ~

the developer proposition in 2008 was that you could sign up, get credentials, drop the ribbit sdk into a rails or asp.net project, and have working outbound and inbound phone calls inside your app within an afternoon. call recording, transcription (via a partner integration), sms sending, presence detection. all of it billed through ribbit's own metered pricing rather than through a phone carrier account. this was structurally the same offer twilio would launch four months later in november 2008 at cheaper unit rates and with a cleaner REST API.

ribbit tried to compete on the enterprise-friendly angle. the carrier connection through BT would in theory give ribbit better international call quality and cheaper long-distance than twilio's scrappier voip-over-anything setup. that theory did not hold. by 2010 twilio had eaten the small-developer segment and the enterprise customers who might have preferred ribbit's carrier story were mostly buying from their existing telco account managers, not from a startup subsidiary in mountain view.

~ the BT problem ~

the standard corporate-acquisition failure mode showed up on time. BT wanted the ribbit developer team to accelerate BT's own internal digital-services roadmap. ribbit's founders wanted to keep shipping external APIs at startup speed. the two agendas were incompatible inside a fifteen-billion-dollar UK carrier's operating model. integration meetings replaced product meetings. sign-up flows stopped getting updates. the ribbit.com blog went quiet in mid-2010 and never really came back.

on 10 august 2011 gigaom reported that BT was shutting down ribbit's external-facing operations and its developer program. existing customers were given a couple of months to migrate to other providers. the ribbit team was folded into BT's technology, service and operations division and effectively disappeared into internal BT platform work.

~ the next chapter ~

what ribbit was trying to build is now a boring category. twilio made it into an ipo. plivo, vonage nexmo, sinch, and half a dozen other cpaas players cover the same api surface at commodity pricing. voice as a programmable feature is a checkbox in every saas backend. the ribbit brand does not survive anywhere, including inside BT, but the category ribbit called first is still the same one every b2b communications company competes on.

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