Ribbit leveraging Flash Player... duhhh
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Published
Monday, December 17, 2007
at
10:29 AM
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I have had the distinct pleasure of working with Ribbit for the past 6 months and watching this Silicon Valley start-up emerge as the leader in merging RIA and VOIP. The key is that Ribbit can integrate voice and PSTN phone features into any website or desktop applications using AIR or Flash Player. They chose Flash Player because it runs on 95% of computers connected to the Internet with no installation. Flash Player in this case provides real-time 2 way audio integration through the use of Adobe's RTMP protocol and allows developers complete control of the user interface. I keep seeing great things coming from Ribbit and I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Hats off to the development team at Ribbit, especially my good friend Charles Freedman. Charles was a key engineer on Yahoo Maps and early Flex adopter. Charles departed Yahoo to help Flex enable Ribbit's VOIP platform with rich UI.
Chuck, golf is on me this week!
cheers,
Ted :)
I wonder how this matches with the Pacifica VoIP efforts done by Adobe... Both solutions look very very similar, don't they?
Ribbit looks similar to Pacifica but they are wildly different. Pacifica adds a full SIP stack into Flash Player and the scope is far wider than voice alone. SIP is optimal for data exchange, real-time messaging, peer. The inital release covers voice and data and later releases support peer, video/audio/binary AMF. Actually Pacifica solves a key scalability issue with Ribbit in allowing SIP integration with a higher quality voice standard and better compression than the Nellymoser codec used in RTMP.
They are wildly different beasts but sound similar on paper. Regardless they both leverage Flash Player and will enable developers to create great new services and applications.
Ted :)
I am missing something here... when Pacifica launches why would one want to use Ribbit anymore? Surely, they must have a business model/angle that wont be rendered obsolete by Pacifica. Your comments about Pacifica seem to indicate a superset of functionality than what Ribbit provides..no ?
It is confusing to say the least!
Pacifica will not provide support for the service level that Ribbit provides today like multi-network PSTN Call routing, Voice Mail APIs, Directory, Etc, yet Pacifica will enable Ribbit to support higher quality voice, full peer support, audio/video, and higher scalability on the server side.
It seems like they compete but in fact they do not. VOIP is much larger than just calling user to user, it is about data exchange server to server, client to server, and client to client or client to many clients.
Everyone wants to make VOIP/SIP a winner/looser thing but it is about a much larger opportunity in service integration and there will be many winners.
Comparing Pacifica and Ribbit is similar to comparing Boeing and United Airlines. Both do wildly different things: Make/Service Airplanes vs Sell/Manage Flights.
My PERSONAL take is that Adobe and Ribbit will find themselves long term working together and enabling one another rather than competing.
Ted :)
It would be great if Pacifica would be equal to native SIP support in the Flash player but now it seems to be some hosted & closed solution (for which you can build your own front-end) that nobody can use in combination with their own SIP gateways (not even Ribbit)... As long as this is the case I guess companies like Ribbit won't be very interested as they are mostly interested in the telephony minutes.
"hosted & closed solution" is a bit strong. The reason it is hosted is due to quality of service. For client to client SIP solutions to work, clients need to find one another and if they are behind a firewall routing data across a service makes everyone accessible. At some level it looks closed but in others this is the only way it would work for 100% of Internet connected users. This is how Skype works in effect and currently there are no open API's to access audio/video/binary/xml data exchange over point to point connections. When Pacifica gets its day in the sun, I think people will see it is far more than just "Voice" and will enable a new class of applications. It is just more fabric that you can use to build RIA.
My 2 cents,
Ted :)
It would be nice if Pacifica ships with examples of using gizmoproject.com
Gizmoproject is an OPEN SIP Network with thousands of users with Software and Hardware SIP endpoints.
You can even get a Free incoming PSTN
from IPKALL.com to a gizmoproject.com
I wonder why it even matters for Pacifica to be SIP based, if the Flash client only works against Adobes server backend?
Naming control over quality and the NAT/Firewall traversal issue as the reason for Pacifica to be a closed solution is bogus. That's just what Skype does.
The real reason is probably to extort fees of some sort. Understandable, but let's be honest.