“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 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, 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.