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.

Meanwhile, AT&T asserts that while it prefers existing internet principles and does not want radical expansions under the FCC, if the Commission does choose to further regulate, "It absolutely must ensure that any such rules apply evenly - not just to network operators but also to providers of Internet applications, content and services. Anything less would be ineffective, legally suspect and, in all events, a direct repudiation of President Obama's call for a 'level playing field'."

In your opinion should Google Voice be subject to the same rules that apply to AT&T or do you believe that web-based telephony groups like Skype, Google and Jajah should fall under a separate set of regulations?

Photo Credit: Aislinn Ritchie

• Limited choice of mobile phones. I chose the BlackBerry, because I'm used to it. No, T-Mobile doesn't offer the iPhone!
• Wi-Fi phone and data on your mobile. This is the interesting bit. Basically, wherever you have Wi-Fi, you will have free minutes.
• GPRS, which is what you would use if you don't have access to Wi-Fi.
• Wi-Fi land line. This looks like an ordinary phone but connects to your high-speed line as a VoIP phone. Other companies offer this, but getting the whole bundle from your cell phone provider is pretty cool.

My Experience

First, no disclosure needed. I bought this at a regular T-Mobile store and paid the regular listed price. This was not a journalism assignment.

Here are the key points:

• I've reduced my cell phone minutes dramatically... as in, cut them in half.
• Most of my calls are from the office, home and other locations that I visit regularly. The phone picks those up regularly. For example, when I get home, the phone says "Home" (it says "T-Mobile" when I am in cell phone mode). That's it. Nothing else to do. Just make (free) calls.
• Call quality is mostly fine. If you see three Wi-Fi bars or fewer, it's a bit flaky. You'll hear voices in slow motion, like a tape winding doooown.
• Push email comes through fine. This matters for when you are out of the country. You will still get email without having to sign up for an expensive international plan. You are not 100% always on, as you are with GPRS, but for many people who travel, it's good enough. If not, just pay for the international plan.
• It's amazing how many places I found in my test across Switzerland, France, and America that have open Wi-Fi access. I just hit "Scan for networks" on my BlackBerry, and there they are. Note: I'm writing this in Herald Square, New York City, with three open Wi-Fi bars on my BlackBerry. Hm, who shall I call?

Industry Implications

• The implications are practical mainstream stuff and carry a very simple message for consumers: save money.
• It shows that big companies can innovate and are not always afraid to disrupt their own cash cows in their quest for more market share. Kudos to T-Mobile.
• This will make Apple even keener to dump AT&T as soon as possible.
• This puts pressure on Skype to deliver a practical, simple device for mobile phones.

If you want to save some extra money and you don't need Google Voice to forward any of your SMS messages to your phone because you're at your computer anyway, make sure you turn off SMS forwarding under Settings -> Phones -> Edit.

While Google Voice is still an invite-only service, Google is slowly opening the service up to more users. Apple, of course, is still 'reviewing' whether it will allow the Google Voice iPhone app into the App Store, but there can be no doubt that Google Voice has the potential to drive some revenue away from cell phone carriers. International calls are cheap, transcribed voicemails that are forwarded to your email are free, you can easily record calls, and you don't need to pay for SMS messages you receive. Over time, Google will surely add a few more features to Google Voice (and maybe bring back some features it dropped from GrandCentral's original feature set). Users still have to connect calls through the cell phone carriers' traditional phone network, but that's about the only service a user would need from AT&T and Co (besides a data plan, of course).

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.

After acquiring GrandCentral, Google continued to operate the old service, but didn't allow new users to sign up. Now, Google has announced that it will first port existing users over to Google Voice in the next couple of days, and will then open up Google Voice to new users.

Interface

The new interface will look a lot like Gmail, with your inbox, SMS messages, access to voicemail and other features in a sidebar on the left.

Making Calls

You can make calls directly from the Google Voice web interface. After you initiate the call, the service will actually first call your mobile phone or landline, and after that your call will be placed over Google's network.

Calls within the U.S. will remain free, and users can purchase credit to make international calls (we don't have information about the international rates yet, but we assume that they will be competitive with those that Skype currently offers).

Google Voice will also offer free conference calls.

Voicemail

The automated voicemail transcription feature looks like it will be one of the most useful functions of Google Voice. Transcriptions are fully automated and Google will mark passages in the text where the algorithm was not very confident about the transcription. Transcriptions will automatically appear in your inbox, but Google Voice can also email them to you, or even send you an SMS with the text.

Future Integration with Android?

We can't help but wonder if Google will integrate the voicemail and transcription service with Android as well. In this video, Google shows the mobile version of Google Voice in the browser on an Android phone, but we assume that Google will release a dedicated Google Voice app for Android in the future and maybe even make it an integral part of the Android experience (if the carriers allow Google to do so, that is).

Just What the Doctor Ordered

Google Voice looks like a clear winner to us. It takes the best features of GrandCentral and adds a number of important and interesting new features like SMS messaging and voicemail transcriptions. Clearly this is one of the most important products that Google has released in the last couple of months and we will post a more detailed review of the service once it becomes available to us.

Today, many a virtual business can only run thanks to Skype's ability to bypass the expensive phone networks. Here at RWW, we use Skype extensively throughout the day, and while other products like Gizmo might offer a similar feature set, nobody else ever got the market penetration that Skype got thanks to its early start.

EBay

But besides all the technical innovation, Skype's biggest news day came in September 2005, when it was acquired by eBay for a staggering $2.6 billion dollars. It doesn't seem as if anybody ever really understood why eBay decided to buy Skype and go ahead with this deal - or why they ever offered this much money in the first place. eBay never integrated Skype into the rest of its business and it was never quite clear how they would do that anyway, besides giving potential buyers an option to connect with sellers through it. In recent months, rumors have flared up repeatedly that eBay was trying to sell off Skype.

Skype 4

The user interface of Skype 4, which is publicly available, but still in beta, is a radical departure from the previous versions and hasn't exactly received many accolades for its new design yet. Skype is trying to put more emphasis on 'conversations,' but in doing so, the company has abandoned the typical horizontal IM layout for one large window with your contacts list and conversations all in one. This tends to take up a lot of space, though you can pop out chat or call windows.

Overall, we are not big fans of the direction Skype is going in with this new version, but given that it is still in beta, hopefully some of the UI weirdnesses will have been addressed by the time it launches. In order to focus its business more, Skype also just announced that it will disable Skypecasts, Skype's ability to broadcast to a large group of listeners, effective September 1st.

For the next five years, Skype's Josh Silverman says that he wants to see Skype move towards 'liquid communication,' where neither device nor place matters.

There's also a problem of congestion. In densely populated areas, as more and more people set up home networks, throughput is dropping as the airwaves get cluttered. David Heinemeier Hansson posted today about noise on his urban wifi connection, and judging from the comments his post received, it's a common problem. The solution? Perhaps mobile broadband.

Moconews pointed to Ericsson’s marketing chief Johan Bergendahl, who said mobile broadband will supplant wifi hotspots as the preferred method of on-the-go web access. "Hotspots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era," he said. Moconews also pointed to a report that mobile broadband uptake is on the rise, and another report that city-wide wifi deployments are also growing -- perhaps indicating that wifi isn't ready to go away yet.

But let's just suppose that mobile broadband does become the dominant method of connecting to the Internet. Let's pretend that high cost, limited service territories, and speed barriers are overcome. What would the result be?

Perhaps the most interesting result would be that cellular voice networks would be forced to give way to VoIP, and services like Skype or JAJAH might be well positioned for a mobile broadband dominated world. With fast, reliable, and ubiquitous mobile broadband access, cellular voice plans would be irrelevant given cheaper VoIP options. We've already seen some voice-over-IP services target mobile users, such as JAJAH's iPhone optimized version.

That would be mean less costs for consumers -- no more free public wifi (presumably), but a slimmer cell phone bill and a single broadband connection that could cover mobile phone, web access, and landline telephone. Throw in a VoIP television service like Joost (which is starting to test live streaming this month) or Livestation, and the future might be one connection that covers all of your media and communication needs.

That simple future is a ways off, though. Mobile broadband isn't cheap, it isn't as fast as wired broadband, and it doesn't have the coverage necessary to be a truly reliable alternative to wifi hotspots (let alone voice networks). But is that future coming? Probably. HSPA+, which may arrive late this year, will offer speeds of up to 42 Mbps down and 11 Mbps up, which is significantly faster than my 20/2 Mbps cable line, and astronomically faster than the iPhone's current EDGE network (which is around 240 kbps down).

There are a lot of barriers to overcome -- not least of which, how to handle billing consumers when roaming on other networks and how to make the various competing standards play nice (or get networks to conform to a single standard). But once those issues are solved, fast, cheap, ubiquitous mobile broadband may be on the horizon.

When do you think mobile broadband will be fast enough, cheap enough, and ubiquitous enough to supplant wifi? Will that ever happen? If it does, what other side effects will we see? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.