What’s Up Doc - Is Ribbit Sick or Dead? 04/04/11
Posted by Birchills Telecom on Mon, Apr 04, 2011 @ 03:06 PM
Remember Bugs Bunny and his catch phrase “What’s Up Doc?”. It’s a question we’ve been asking about a different rodent – Ribbit.
BT paid a whopping $105m in 2008 for this start up business in America and has now put it out to pasture. It seems that the organisation used to employ around 30 people but BT have driven that number up to around 50. The Ribbit external facing company seems to have died and it is now incorporated into the Design and Innovate team within BT.
Ribbit seemed to be involved in producing voice apps for computers. They had developed 3 products apparently. One was a desktop widget which allowed you to call someone from your computer – maybe they hadn’t heard of Skype - and the other 2 involved integration with networks – or something.
Linkedin seem to indicate that most of the executive team from Ribbit remain doing whatever research they are doing. The website traffic, although has almost disappeared.
So BT seem to have paid $105m to hire a few dozen people in America to do some undefined research. I assume that BT must be hoping that their shareholders didn’t notice.
Written by David Hill
Chairman Birchills Telecom
About Birchills
Birchills Telecom is at the forefront of the revolution in hosted VoIP. The voice technology that is transforming small business telephone systems. It gives you all of the features of a large pbx with none of the cost. No wonder that over 800 professionals now subscribe.