When Silicon Valley telephony startup Ribbit announced the availability on Monday of its SmartSwitch, an open platform for embedding telephone capabilities in any Flash-enabled browser, it took square aim at one of the leading technological trends of the past decade: smartphones.
While smartphones are becoming more computer-like every day, Ribbit is coming from the opposite direction. In a press statement, the company said that it has the potential of converting any of the world’s 750 million computers into “the next generation of phones,” with developers deciding how they work.
But thanks in part to its lengthy history, telephony is a complicated business, and substantial questions remain about how effectively Ribbit can bridge the dynamic world of Web development with telephony’s often arcane and inconsistent technical standards.
Integration and Security
“It’s not clear to me whose underlying network infrastructure (‘wires’) is being used,” said Lisa Pierce, vice president at Forrester Research.
“It’s not really possible to completely separate applications from infrastructure (for example, apps require certain infrastructure performance parameters, and those still vary quite a bit),” she said. “Who tests the apps and makes sure they all play well together and don’t cause interoperability problems?”
Pierce added that it remains unclear how Ribbit will be able to assure tolerable performance by applications without providing tight linkage to existing telephony infrastructure. That might be more complicated, she suggested, than Ribbit anticipates.
“There is also no mention of security — a major concern with VoIP,” Pierce said, adding that the fact that Ribbit is proposing an open platform for developers only heightens security issues.
Links to Business Apps
With the ink barely dry on Ribbit’s press release, it may be premature to contemplate possible exit strategies for the startup. The company is buoyed by $13 million in venture capital and also has announced a new deal with Salesforce.com to integrate the…