When people mention consumer oriented voice applications, I only have two responses that feel honest. I either shrug my shoulders or cringe. I shrug my shoulders because I really don’t know what consumers want from a phone that they don’t get now. I realize that they want easier to use phones, better [...]
As I reported a few weeks ago, Ribbit has indeed been sold to BT, and as many thought, it wasn’t for 55 million. It was for $105 million… which makes complete sense to me. I know I’m going to cross over into the report I’m writing again if I’m not careful, but here’s the math [...]
Exactly a year ago, I predicted the demise of Ooma… pretty much equating them to one of the horsemen of the apocolypse. Dean challenged me on my prediction, we made a bet, Alec agreed to be the judge, and now the day of reckoning has come. Dean’s claiming victory (nice graphic, by the way):I’m going [...]
but I’m close. Even if I wasn’t, I’d have to take exception with Alec’s iPhone post this morning, where Alec was comparing RIM to Apple:
It’s as if Apple is the Washington Capitals with one very talented star player in iPhone and RIM is the Detroit Redwings with a full line of talented and deep players. [...]
CloudVox goes public today, and from where I sit, the games have begun. CloudVox is a service from a company lead by nice guy Troy Davis that solves a fundamental problem: connect up my voice application to the PSTN. Without CloudVox, you would have to take your wonderful adhearsion application and install it into a [...]
Now for something completely different… Since this is a week where I’m only coding (yes!), I thought it would be nice to go over some of the snippets of code that I thought other voice mashup guys would want to have around. Here’s one: ActiveDirectory and Ruby.
The short story is Microsoft rules the Enterprise, and [...]
Phone Boy has a great post in GigaOM today answering the question “Is there money in Voice APIs?” I simply can’t let it go by without comment.
I’ve been covering the VoIP space since 2004, and lately it seems like every other press release sent my way is from a company announcing the addition of an [...]
My gut reaction when I saw the iPhone numbers today was disbelief, then I couldn’t help laughing. According to Apple, since July 11th, they’ve sold a million phones and ten million applications. In three days. I wonder if McDonalds could sell ten million hamburgers in a weekend. Let’s see how laughable this is:
Just last [...]
TechCrunch reports today that BT has acquired Ribbit for $55 million to build GrandCentral competitor. The article states that the company has denied the rumors, but wouldn’t comment on wether or not the merger discussions were occuring or not. Given that Ribbit recently raised $13 million dollars, it’s interesting that they exited so early, [...]