Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Has BT Bought Ribbit?

Lots of smart and experienced people think application developers will not find a warm reception in the tier one carrier community. I think that's dead wrong. Never have "telco" executives been more aware that they need partners to create compelling new applications.

So VentureBeat reports that BT has purchased Ribbit, a voice platform company playing in the "communications enable business processes" space. Think of the way voice gets integrated with Salesforce.com.

Techcrunch says Ribbit has been bought by BT for $55 million. But there's still some speculation that the deal isn't done yet.

No matter. The important thing is that the deal illustrates a trend: telcos no longer have a "not invented here" attitude about applications and services invented by third parties.

There is lots of room for application developers to create interesting features service providers will want to offer.

For my friends at Qwest: talk to Fonolo.

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