It is hard to look at Ribbit Mobile without comparing it to Google Voice. Just like Google Voice, Ribbit gives users a new phone number or they can use call forwarding to transfer calls from their mobile phones to Ribbit's platform. Ribbit Mobile also has quite a few features that Google doesn't offer, including the ability to make calls from within the browser.

More Features than Google Voice

As Ribbit Mobile is part of Ribbit's open VoIP platform, the service can even forward calls to your Skype, MSN or Google Talk account if you don't pick up your mobile phone. Whenever you miss a call or when a new voicemail arrives, Ribbit can also ping you by email, Skype, Google Talk or SMS. Through its partners, Ribbit offers widgets for popular start pages like iGoogle and social networks like Facebook and MySpace. Through these - as well as on the service's homepage - users can receive and place calls from their browsers. This is a feature that Google Voice doesn't offer yet.

GrandCentral, which Google bought and then transformed into Google Voice, offered some of the features that Ribbit Mobile now offers. Google dropped quite a few useful features like call chains from Google Voice's feature line-up, however.

Besides call chains, another nice feature of Ribbit Mobile is that you can choose which number will appear on your contacts' phones when you call, even if you are calling from your computer. Once you are on a call, you can also easily transfer calls from any device to another. Because of this, you can start a call in the web interface or iGoogle and then continue the call on your cell phone.

Just like Google Voice, Ribbit gives users the option to set up a new phone number for their Ribbit accounts. Users can search for a specific number and letter combination in these numbers. For now, Ribbit only offers numbers in select cities such as California and New York.

A service like Ribbit Mobile wouldn't be very useful as you couldn't easily import your contacts. Thankfully, users can import contacts from Plaxo and as an Outlook CSV file (Google Contacts can export an Outlook CSV file).

Caller ID 2.0

As Ribbit's CEO Ted Griggs and co-founder Crick Waters told us yesterday, the company wants users to look at Ribbit Mobile as a "personal customer relationship management (CRM) platform." To do so, Ribbit Mobile doesn't just display a caller's name and phone number. Users can also add notes to every call and connect their Ribbit address book with their Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr accounts. Through this, the Ribbit team noted, conversations can now take place within a context.

Voicemail Transcriptions

Ribbit offers two levels of voicemail transcriptions. Free accounts come with automated transcriptions. Users with professional accounts - which are free during the beta period - can also choose to have 'business-class' level transcriptions, where a human checks the computer-transcribed text and edits it.

Ribbit for Developers

Because Ribbit is an open platform, developers can use the service in their own applications. Ribbit already features five apps in its app store, including an SMS widget, an Adobe AIR app for checking voicemails and a conference widget. Ribbit also plans to launch its own mobile applications for the iPhone and Blackberry platforms soon. Developers are free to charge for their applications and Ribbit also offers a profit-sharing program where developers will be paid if users use their applications.

Joining the Beta

Ribbit will slowly scale the service up over the next few weeks. The company will hand out new accounts on a first come, first serve basis. You can sign up for an account here. All service levels are available for free during the beta period, though Ribbit plans to charge for the pro accounts later on.

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.

Cuil: Good, But Not Great

This week a new search engine called Cuil launched out of stealth-mode. As some had predicted, it seems Google's announcement about the size of its search index was a preemptive move to take some momentum away from one of Cuil's main features: the size of its index with 120 billion pages. As Cuil's team features quite a number of Google alumni, comparisons with Google's search are inevitable. In our tests, however, Cuil performed nowhere near as well as Google.

See also: Wow, How Did Cuil Get So Much Publicity on Day 1?! and Yahoo BOSS Should Capitalize On Cuil Damp Squib Launch

Why British Telecom Bought Ribbit, The Web Telephony Platform

Communications company British Telecom (BT) has acquired innovative web telephony platform Ribbit for a reported $105 million. BT has been sniffing around the Bay Area for startups to acquire for some time and this one is a great fit. Not just because both companies are in the voice market but because as a means of folding click-to-call functionality into any web application - Ribbit is fascinating. BT was supposed to be a big mover and shaker in the communications industry of the future, but it hasn't worked out that way so far. Can Ribbit move the needle for BT? We think it could in a big way.

Google Acquires Omnisio

Maybe to counter some of the bad news around YouTube this week, Google just announced the acquisition of the Y Combinator funded video annotation and mashup company Omnisio. According to Google, the acquisition of Omnisio will allow them to keep pushing the envelope of what is possible with online video. Neither Google nor Omnisio have commented on the price of the acquisition, but it is clear that the Omnisio team is going to join YouTube.

Yahoo Music Does The Right Thing: Issues Refunds to Customers

Last Thursday, we reported that Yahoo Music was going to shut down its store and DRM licensing servers on September 30, which was basically going to leave anybody who ever bought music from the Yahoo Music Store without a license to play their music. Now, however, Yahoo has announced that it will issue a refund to its customers for the full value of their purchases. Yahoo is also looking at making copies of the music its customers bought available to them as MP3s without any DRM.

The Bigger Questions Behind The Scrabulous Shutdown

As of this week, Scrabulous, the wildly popular Facebook Scrabble game, is no more. If you try to login to the app now you'll get the message "Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice." You have the option of entering your email address to receive further information about developments in the matter. While Scrabulous fans are certainly angered over the app's shutdown, the unanswered question still looms: did Hasbro have to do this?

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Some Web Apps Work Better Together

How many new websites can you fit in a Volkswagen Beetle? Sometimes it feels like that's what we're trying to do these days - but all these new applications and services don't have to be crammed into our heads and lives as separate things to try out and remember. Many new technologies work best in concert; the functionality of one application can be vastly improved by using it together with another one. Here are some of our favorite examples of apps that work best together, followed by some favorite workflows from friends of ReadWriteWeb. We hope you'll share your favorite combos in comments, too, so we can all learn some new things.

Peering Into Microsoft's Cloud

On July 24th, Microsoft held their annual Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM), an event where many of Microsoft's top executives come together to talk about the company's progress and achievements. At this year's meeting, Microsoft Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie hinted at Microsoft's cloud initiatives, a part of their Software + Services (S+S) strategy. While Ozzie did not reveal either codenames or ship dates during his speech, there is still some information we can piece together to help determine what Microsoft's cloud will look like.

Brandstreaming: What Is It & Who's Doing It?

If there's a hot new social media trend happening, you can bet that companies are trying to find a way to use it too. It happened of course with blogging, it happened with Twitter, and it is now happening with FriendFeed and other lifestreaming apps. Indeed RSS vendor Pheedo has coined a neat term for this: brandstreaming. It defines a brandstream as "a consistent flow of content created by a brand". According to a recent report, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher's site - through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices.

What Startups Can Learn From Haruki Murakami

Alex Iskold is a big fan of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. The genius of Murakami is in his discipline, focus and determination. He seems him as a virtual Zen master - an embodiment of wisdom, passion, skills and exceptional will. The elements of his work and life story are inspirational and (here's where ReadWriteWeb comes in) particularly applicable when you're running a startup. Therefore in this post, we take a look at what modern technology startups can learn from this Japanese literary master.

The Google Knol Threat to Content Businesses - a Wiki Plug-in Might Level The Playing Field

Does Knol (our review) make Google into a “content company”? Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis made a compelling case this week. You can say he is conflicted, because his Mahalo venture has a lot to lose if Knol succeeds. Or you can say that he knows of what he speaks, because he is in the eye of the storm. Jason’s view that Google is the closest we have to an operating system for the web makes sense. His comparison to how Microsoft, an earlier generation operating system vendor, invaded the application market that had belonged to their partners, rings true. This is what dominant tech companies have always done.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

BT was supposed to be a big mover and shaker in the communications industry of the future. Telephony expert Om Malik has been watching the company's progress closely though, and says that it has largely failed to live up to its promise. Can Ribbit move the needle for BT? We think it could in a big way.

We argue that well built developer platforms are the key to the future of every industry. The internet has blown wide open the means of production in content and is now aimed at the scarcity of functionality next. Even with giant research and development budgets, established companies are increasingly hard pressed to compete with the innovation brought to market by a whole world of developers once those developers are handed Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

The big companies can offer mass distribution, financial and tech security - but they sure aren't the only game in town any more. Smart telecom companies know their time as local monopolists is counting down fast. Companies like Ribbit and others powered by Ribbit could quickly offer better, cheaper, more exciting telephone service than companies like BT. Someone had to buy Ribbit and it's a sign of the ineptitude of US telecom companies that none of them did.

What's Ribbit All About?

When we first heard about Ribbit, we thought it sounded like a whole lot of hype that wouldn't amount to much. How exciting is voice communication anymore? After hearing about a number of use cases, though, we became much more interested in the company.

Ribbit is a platform that lets developers add click-to-call functionality to other applications on the web. It's really easy to set up a way for users to make a voice call over the internet to a particular phone number. See, for example, the shot below of Ribbit functionality being added to a widget in drag-and-drop widget authoring service SproutBuilder.

The other use case that interests us is a short list of Adobe AIR applications powered by Ribbit. Though the AIR iPhone may be more frivolous than anything else, as a proof of concept it's powerful. Ribbit's own consumer app Amphibian is more significant.

Andrew Powell's mashup of Mapquest, Kayak hotel look-up and Ribbit to call found hotels is also pretty cool. The 5,000 developers already signed up for access to Ribbit will also be offered a list of new features as of today, so even more innovation should be delivered in short order.

The point is that Ribbit is a platform that that offers to move voice calls off of the handset and outside the relatively slow-moving development environment of Skype. There are a world of interface and functionality possibilities that could be set on top of Ribbit.

Michael Boustridge, President, BT Americas said in the release about the deal: "The Ribbit platform makes it simpler, cheaper and faster to build communications functionality into applications, enabling developers to introduce new revenue-generating voice services in hours, rather than weeks. By combining the Ribbit platform with BT's existing web services, we have the potential to deliver some of the world's finest applications for communications innovation benefiting consumers and businesses alike."

Will Acquisition Propel Ribbit Forward?

Will developers engage, though? As Om Malik again pointed out today, Ribbit to date has stirred up limited developer interest. We suspect however that two factors will contribute to a significant increase in interest.

First, being owned by a very large company (operating in 150 countries after 27 years) could lend some real stability and visibility to Ribbit. Second, being owned by a European company, where there's a stronger history of innovation in telephony and higher expectations, could help propel development better than the climate in Silicon Valley has. There is relatively little innovation in telephony in the US, in case you haven't noticed. The iPhone platform could help change that but it's only beginning.

We're excited to see what BT can do with Ribbit. We're thrilled to see a consumer infrastructure play, based on APIs, focused on an unexpected technology (a telephony API instead of say, an ecommerce API) rock out to the tune of $100 million plus. That's great news for innovators in general.

Will BT strangle Ribbit? Telecom companies generally aren't a breath of fresh air into any polite conversation, but to a great degree this situation isn't unlike every other acquisition by a major player of a small one. As a development platform, however, Ribbit seems particularly well oriented to maintain some integrity in a larger company. We'll have to watch and see.

Someone had to buy Ribbit, though, and we expect to see developer platforms rolled out by all telecom companies around the world within the next two years. In many cases it will cost a lot more than $100 million, too.