Ribbit Proves an Important Point for Open Web Telephony APIs

by Sam Dean - Apr. 29, 2008Comments (1)

Internet telephony startup Ribbit announced today that one of its long-standing "proof of concept" projects is now available: an integration with Salesforce.com's on-demand customer relationship management applications. Ribbit-handled voice messages can now be integrated with Salesforce in various ways, including having them converted to text, and much more. While there is proof of concept behind this integration for Ribbit and its commercial efforts, there is also proof of concept here for open source developers who have their eyes on the growing synergies between online telephony and open source.

The Ribbit Developer Plaftorm continues to feature an open Ribbit Developer API that can energize web-based applications with telephony functions. Developers can add functionality to applications for making and receiving calls, recording, sending and receiving voice messages, as well as adding and organizing contacts. Check out Ribbit's developer page for ideas on integrating Ribbit with Adobe AIR, using Ribbit's Flash component set, and more.

There are, of course, other telephony offerings already being integrated with many web applications. For example, Cisco sells products for such integration. However, as InfoWorld quotes Greg Goldfarb, general manager of software as a service at Ribbit as saying, such products are "interdependent on having a certain type of infrastructure."

Ribbit's open API is an open opportunity for many developers. The integration with Salesforce illustrates how a popular application and an open telephony API can create a useful hookup. Open source applications of many kinds can benefit as well. You can find more interesting thoughts on Ribbit here.