What Can Voice Do For You? Ribbit Announces Winners of KillerApps Challenge
Ribbit, the VOIP platform that was bought by British Telecom last year, announced the winners of its $100,000 KillerApps challenge today. The contest was obviously meant to stimulate interest in Ribbit's APIs among developers, and judging from the line-up of winning applications, a lot of developers came up with highly creative ways of using Ribbit's platform in their apps.
Ribbit opened up its API about one and a half years ago, but even though the company was quickly bought up by British Telecom in July 2008, it was only after this year's SXSW, where Ribbit won the Innovative Web Technologies category in Microsoft's BizSpark Accelerator, that it appeared on our radar again.
We spoke to the Ribbit team yesterday, and while Ribbit is currently focused on providing SDK's and toolkits for Adobe's Flex and Flash platforms, it is also currently testing a RESTful API in private beta, which will soon allow developers to integrate Ribbit's platform into numerous other programming languages as well.
Winners
Here are the winners of the five categories in Ribbit's KillerApps challenge:
Media, Advertising, Entertainment: Lucid Viewer
Lucitd Viewer is an authoring tool that allows developers to create interesting, immersive experiences. This demo here, for example, shows a 3D, Google StreetView-like view of a street in Rome, with the ability to call up stores directly from the Flash interface through Ribbit's service. Lucid Viewer also won the Grand Price in Ribbit's KillerApps contest.
Business: Sugared Frog
Similar to Ribbit's own integration with Salesforce, Sugared Frog integrates Ribbit with SugarCRM. With the help of Sugared Frog, users of SugarCRM's open source solution can use Sugared Frog to organize their voicemail, and dictate notes and memos right from their mobile phones.
Social Networking and Communication: Save A Life
Save a Life is an interesting Adobe AIR application that allows you to quickly reach a group of friends or community members by phone. Currently, the application focuses on blood donations (you can download the application here), though the program could be used for other donation campaigns or emergency services as well.
Breakthrough: CYHAA
CYHAA won Ribbit's free-form 'breakthrough' category. CYHAA, which stands for Control Your Home, Anytime, Anywhere allows users to control their smart home devices with their voice right from their phones.
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CYHAA is really cool.. I really love the idea of controlling those devices using your own voice through phones.
Where is the fifth category? I only see 4 winners?
To Doug-
Here is a list of the winners from all 5 categories
http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/31/ribbit-announces-winners-of-its-killer-mobile-apps-contest/
http://ca.sys-con.com/node/900506
Looks like the "Simplephone" is missing on this one.
Awesome... something I was looking for... Thank You!
RWW: A+
Hi Frederic,
Just wanted to clarify Ribbit is NOT a VOIP platform.
What Ribbit offers is a rich communications platforms that ties voice, messaging and other forms of communications together.
In addition to the five winners in our Killer App Challenge, another good example of this is the Consumers Price application a developer built using the API from Ribbit and Best Buy. Voice is one component, then he added in SMS and email too (in addition to Flickr and Twitter feeds).
I think it a critical distinction as we don't want to limit developers to build just voice enabled applications. We want them to get creative in the ways they communicate with their users and the Ribbit API empowers them to step outside the box and build something really kick ass.
that is great! I like it!
thanks for sharing the information and nice article.
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