Ribbit is proof that the Valley is on crack

“Silicon Valley’s first phone company” as Ribbit likes to call themselves, just received $10 Million in VC funding. Ribbit will give developers the opportunity to create applications that enable telephony features to be integrated straight into a website or service on your phone or desktop. In Ribbit’s next release you will be able to record calls and even have them transcribed! Give me a break, voice usage is shrinking and in todays highly asynchronous world a phone call is about the most distracting thing that can happen to you. Ribbit claims to software that emulates a high grade “class 5″ switch, but when you need to advertise features like that to win customers instead of genuine use cases then you’re doing something wrong.

During Nokia (NYSE: NOK) World Anssi Vanjoki highlighted some figures on some research Nokia had done on smartphone users. Voice usage was only 12% of what people were doing (slide 6) on their device. Industry analysis of Vodafone (NYSE: VOD), one of the worlds largest operators, states that the growth in the mobile telecommunications industry is being fueled by messaging and data. “Voice 2.0?” More like waste of money.