[excerpt]Ribbit is showcasing their platform at demo these days and one of the main announcement is Amphibian, their first product for “everyone” built on top of the Ribbit platform. [/excerpt]
I can say the number of features they offer is impressive, together with a new approach in offering some services to the final user. The “Caller ID 2.0” and the “Shout“, while nothing really new, are well integrated into their service and offer an intuitive way to communicate with each other, together with the automatic transcriptions of your voicemail, that you can now search by keywords (BTW, I would never pay for that).
The feeling I’m getting from Ribbit is “integration”, something that makes me think that everything I need to communicate is there, at my fingertips.
Aside from the GUI, really very well done, the only concern I have is about the business model. I already expressed my concerns to Don Thorson, their marketing guru (BTW, great job!) and again I repeat that there are mainly two points I want to stress:
1) you get money when developers do, but are developers doing enough money to make you happy? I have doubts…
2) big customers won’t share their users/revenues (revenues, if any) with you. They are willing to pay you something, but forget a recurring shared fee.
Aside from my concerns, I think Ribbit is definitely a new service to keep under my radar, even if the big G with my friends at GrandCentral have the potential to launch something much bigger (and they are working hard on this), like Paul Kapustka notes, too.
amphibian, don thorson, luca filigheddu, ribbit
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