If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

After last week’s rumors, It’s now official: BT bought Ribbit for 105M.

More here.

BT today announced it has acquired Ribbit Corporation, a Silicon Valley-based ‘Telco 2.0′ platform company, for $105 million in cash, on a cash-free, debt-free basis. The acquisition will accelerate BT’s strategy to transform itself into a next- generation, platform-based, software-driven services company.

Congrats to all the Ribbit team!

Technorati Tags: acquisition, BT, Deals, luca filigheddu, ribbit, Voice 2.0, VoIP

According to trusted sources it seems that Ribbit has been acquired by the incumbent british telecom operator BT. Ribbit was launched a couple of months ago and they defined themselves as the Silicon Valley’s First phone company. It seems the deal has not been finalized yet, but should be close to the final step.

I’ve been in touch with Don Thorson @ Ribbit and watched their wonderful demo during EComm 2008. It’s one of the most impressive demos I watched and I believe that their strategy, based on creating a huge base of developers using their APIs, has been winning.

British Telecom is known as one of the most innovative operators which was the first to plan how to replace the revenues coming from traditional telephony with other revenue streams coming from new IP based innovative services. Happy to see Ribbit becoming an important piece of BT’s innovative strategy.

Technorati Tags: acquisition, british telecom, Deals, luca filigheddu, ribbit, Voice 2.0, VoIP

After some speculations and rumors, Plaxo announces today that they’ve been acquired by Comcast.

Plaxo will be part of Comcast Interactive Media and will continue to develop their product in their headquarter in Mountain View. 

Plaxo and Comcast have been working together for the past year on a number of initiatives. Plaxo is providing the universal address book for Comcast’s SmartZone communications center (slated to launch later this year), and we are also now hosting all of the address book accounts for Comcast webmail users. Our partnership has already more than doubled the reach of the Plaxo network, bringing the total number of accounts to nearly 50 million.

The immediate effect of the acquisition is the immediate expansion of the Plaxo network, now counting more than 50M members. Nothing should change for the current Plaxo members but Comcast’s customers will surely get benefits from a tighter integration between Plaxo and Comcast’s services.

Technorati Tags: acquisition, comcast, luca filigheddu, plaxo

After the other rumor, last week, about RIM working to release an email client for the Apple iPhone, another rumor hits the blogs and press this week: Apple could buy Adobe soon.

It’s not that difficult to think of such move. Flash and AIR would be a natural complement to the strong position Apple currently has with other powerful applications like Aperture and Final Cut Pro, that they could even stop developing, replaced by Lightroom, Photoshop and Premiere. Most users of Adobe’s products are Apple users too, so why not? In addition, iPhone would be a great platform where Flash and Air could bring the user experience to a step ahead.

Anyway there is a huge downside of this move. At this time, the competition between Lightroom and Aperture as well as Final Cut Pro and Premiere are a big deal for users. Aperture 2.0 has been released a couple of weeks ago, while Adobe’s response, Lightroom 2.0 beta, will be in the hands of developers until August. How is this scenario going to change if the mentioned potential acquisition would occur?

Just a rumor today, maybe reality tomorrow. Not a big deal for users, though.

Technorati Tags: acquisition, adobe, Apple, competition, luca filigheddu

I read today that UK-based mobile VoIP operator Truphone just acquired Sim4Travel, a MVNO which provides a global roaming solution to save costs for international roaming thanks to their SIM card.

According to the announcement, it will take months to integrate Sim4Travel technology into Truphone and we still have to wait for the availability of a Truphone SIM card, but it will surely be a completion of their current service, much limited right now since it works on Wifi-enabled devices only. This is the missing thing. I’m trying to figure out what iPhone + Truphone SIM card could mean, since Truphone has been the first company to get VoIP working natively on the iPhone.

When I talked to James Body from Truphone during my latest trip to the US, he told me that major announcements were in their pipeline. This is definitely one of those, even if I am a little bit surprised that a major competitor of Sim4Travel, MaxRoam, from friend and irish entrepreneur Pat Phelan, is not involved in such deal.

I know Pat and Truphone had many opportunities to talk each other so I’m a little bit surprised about that. I look forward to Pat’s comments on this deal even because I bet Pat’s strategic vision surely helped Truphone indirectly, since MaxRoam had a great visibility during the last months.

Another guess? I also bet that new fresh money hit Truphone’s bank account too. Will they also announce a new round of financing soon?

Technorati Tags: acquisition, luca filigheddu, maxroam, sim4travel, truphone