Ribbit today announced the release of Ribbit Mobile, a free communication suite designed for mobile professionals who need to be able to easily manage all of their phone numbers, communication devices, and how & when they are contacted.Ribbit Mobile is a cloud-based service that lets you manage calls, messages and phones. It's hard not to compare this new offering to Google Voice. One advantage of Ribbit Mobile is that it can make calls from within your browser using their Flash-based software client. Ribbit Mobile features include voicemail transcription, smart call routing, and web-based calling. During the introductory (beta) period, Ribbit is making their "Professional" package free.
Since it leverages Ribbit's open VoIP platform, it can even call your Skype, MSN or Google Talk account, as well as SIP devices.
Additionally, when a new voicemail arrives, Ribbit can notify you via email, Google Talk, Skype, or SMS. Ribbit Mobile transcribes voicemail to text and sends it to you via SMS and email. It also provides a web portal inbox where messages can be managed and stored forever. No voicemail retention limit which is nice.Ribbit Mobile also has something they like to call "Caller ID 2.0" which links your Ribbit contacts address book with your contact's Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr accounts. You can see recent updates made by your contacts to their social networks and pictures of your contacts as seen here:
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Interesting. Is there a side-by-side comparison with Google voice anywhere? Seems like there are going to be some good options available for our ultra-mobile society to stay in touch.
I have some Ribbit Mobile invites available at http://bit.ly/QGGWZ.
Third party applications are an excellent option to unify your communications, but there are many services out there that have this functionality built in. You could use a hosted VoIP PBX for your business that has all of these capabilities and more. This seems like a better option, especially for businesses with 5 employees to 2,000. Thoughts?