Ribbit: Silicon Valley's first phone company?

  Ted Griggs, CEO of Ribbit Corp., calls his Mountain View, Calif. start-up "Silicon Valley's first phone company." He claims that the Ribbit Smart Switch, software that has been certified by Alcatel-Lucent for use in its networks, can connect to legacy telephone networks as well as work with advanced protocols such as the session initiation protocol (SIP) popular in voice-over IP environments. The product also handles normal telco operations such as billing. And, like carrier switches, it runs 24 x 7. So, what makes this a "Silicon Valley" technology? Griggs answers, "We ripped open the walled garden a carrier would put before the switch." That is, the Ribbit Smart Switch has open APIs that software developers can work with to add features the switch lacks, something telcos are loathe to do. For example, developers can create a Facebook widget that adds a dialer to a user's page. Or, as the company demonstrated at a Salesforce.com conference earlier this year, integrate a phone dialer into a CRM package, combining call records with other customer data automatically. Ribbit officially launches itself and its switch today. Ribbit for Salesforce will ship in February. Pricing for the software runs about $25 per month per seat.