There has been a lot of talk about Ribbit, "embed voice" in your web application company today with the announcement of an acquisition by BT. Ribbit is a startup company in Mountain View that has focused on building or enabling voice applications from any computing device using VoIP and Adobe Flash/Flex technologies. From a technology point of view, a key new trend with VoIP and Adobe is that allmost all devices have (or can have) the technology embedded thereby avoiding the giant hurdle of designing and getting new VoIP applications into a mobile phone. From a businss point of view, there are questions around the business model. Paying Ribbit to "go through" their softswitch gateways is together with the fact that paying in most countries for mobile data access using a mobile operators radio network is way too expensive.
It will be interesting to see though what BT will make out of this acquisition having bailed in and out of having their own mobile phone network. More to follow about this and future outlook for mobile phone operators.
