In a fascinating and bold move, BT announced yesterday that it acquired Ribbit for $105 million in cash. It is a powerful example of how the web and telco clouds are morphing into a single platform.
My company SMBLive has partnered with BT over the past few years and we’ve seen “first hand” their tremendous commitment to creating programmable interfaces to enable software developers to unlock the power of the communications network. We developed against BT’s Web21SDK to expose “click to call” inside of the BT Tradespace application. It was quite elegant in many ways – but now with the acquisition of Ribbit by BT – the game has been ratcheted up to an entirely new level for software developers all around the world.
In our particular case, we partner closely with incumbent telco providers to develop software for ultra small businesses (plumbers, florists, barbers, builders, etc.) who are looking for simple ways to find and connect with more customers on the web. Our target user typically has fewer than 15 employees and has very limited or non-existent IT skills.
Our premise is that SMBs want three things from the web:
-
They want their door bill to ring — which requires search optimized and map-able business profiles so people can find you.
-
They want their phone to ring — which requires communications enabled business profiles so people can talk to you.
-
They want their cash register to ring — which requires simple to use ecommerce services so people can buy from you.
To this end, we’re incredibly excited to “Ribbitize” our software and blend communications services into everything we do.
