How Ribbit leapfrogs Skype’s first-gen VoIP

Telephony startup Ribbit today unveiled its first consumer service – code-named Amphibian – running on top of the company’s Web/telephony-integrated development platform.

Ribbit launched its platform late last year (see blog post: How Voice 2.0 Service Ribbit Works — And What They REALLY Want), touting its Flash-based development platform and VoIP-delivery backend as a platform to enable developers to build all sorts of voice/Web-integrated applications.

Its launch focus was on Ribbit integration with Salesforce.com applications, but it promised to deliver a consumer service on the platform as well, both to push application development and – if it catches lightning in a bottle – to drive early platform usage.

Ribbit launched that consumer service, the Web-based Amphibian, today at the Demo Conference. Amphibian will be available for general use starting in the second quarter, the company said.

Amphibian’s starting point is to allow users to link their mobile phones with the Ribbit service online. At that point, you can use the Ribbit interface to manage and route your mobile calls and voice mail, including voice-to-text and voice-to-mp3 conversions; take or make mobile calls from Web pages using a Flash-embeddable Ribbit widget; and make use of enhanced caller ID services that not only display name and number but pull in call social network and Web activity onto a single screen.

In addition to those built-in services, Ribbit launched a “marketplace” for developers to offer and/or sell add-ons to the core Ribbit and Amphibian platforms.

The focus, thus, is not on enabling just Web-based communications – such as in first-generation VoIP services like Skype – but in helping users navigate between the wired/wireless worlds and the Web. As the “flow of personal and business communication continues to evolve, soon all of us will need to thrive in both worlds and move between them with ease,” said Crick Waters, co-founder and vice president of strategy and business development at Ribbit, in announcing Amphibian at Demo today.

We talked with Waters – who coincidentally has a telephony background, including stints at AT&T and Northpoint Communications – when Ribbit launched. Waters stressed the degree to which Ribbit’s back-end isn’t all that different from today’s increasingly IP-based traditional telcos.

What’s different, he said, is Ribbit’s focus on voice “as just another data object. That gives us the ability to integrate voice into the workflow to enable applications that are enabled by voice but are about much more than just that,” he said.

Ribbit did not formally roll out pricing for Amphibian today, but reports indicate P2P calls over the service will be free or low-cost, with minimal charges to finish calls to users over the PSTN. It’s not entirely clear how many mobile minutes a user would consume sending calls and voice mails between their mobile service. Ribbit also plans to charge extra for some services, such as visual voice mail (partner Simulscribe will reportedly offer the voice-to-text option starting at $10 per month).

Ribbit launches into an increasingly competitive “voice 2.0” market. Startups like Jajah, Jaxtr and others have seen growth with free to low-cost calling and embeddable call widgets, while a player like TalkPlus is already focusing on mobile phone/Web integration.

Looming over the entire market is Google, which purchased voice/Web integration startup GrandCentral and is actively developing Web-based telephony services based on GrandCentral. Those services will not only benefit from the Google name, but integration into Google services such as Google Docs or its Gmail email service.