Friday, January 18, 2008

Tringme does the Ribbit

There are Copycats wherever you look. Smith on VoIP today criticizes that "Rebtel Borrows Iotum’s Idea; Now Offers Facebook Conferencing App", while Rebtel themselves feel copied by Jajah Direct:
We want to tip our hat to our friends at Jajah for the introduction of Jajah Direct. Those folks have done a brilliant job at making something that Rebtel has been doing from the start sound brand new and innovative.

What I’m talking about is free or low-cost international calls without the need for Internet access. Or said another way: Rebtel service as it’s been from day No.1.

And while we’ve always thought our service was innovative, it’s super nice when you get validation from a competitor that you really did break new ground and that all the other ways of making a VoIP calls are “old school.”
When I received today the following announcement from Tringme, I couldn't but wonder: Don't I know this story from somewhere else? Then I realized that it was Buzzword Bingo time again. While Tringme recently got great publicity for their Flash based click to call widgets, some days later Ribbit took it all away by also presenting Flash apps and additionally alleging to be Silicon Valley's first Phone Company.
At the core of Ribbit's technology is the Ribbit SmartSwitch™, a sophisticated multi-protocol soft-switch that bridges the worlds of traditional telephony with next generation networks and protocols.

Ribbit is an open platform for telephony innovation. Unlike any other phone company, we are giving our developers unprecedented access to our technology, through the Ribbit API and allowing them to innovate at will. Our business is built more like a software company than a phone company.

Now Tringme announces the "Tringswitch" which sounds quite similar to me. Both products promise to fulfil every VoIP necessity. But nobody has seen them yet in public. Bingo!



TringSwitch Launch and Demo at HeadStart.in

Dear TringMe User,

First of all, we wish you all a very happy 2008!!

Life at TringMe continues to march at a fast pace and we wanted to share some recent developments with you.

Very soon, we will officially launch TringMe's platform server - TringSwitch. TringSwitch is a highly reliable and real-time platform optimized for web-based telephony applications. It's the core back-end of TringMe widgets and is now available for others to build interesting and innovative applications on it. TringSwitch can be integrated with any telephony back-end including SIP server, PSTN gateways, SMS gateways etc. TringSwitch can be used within an enterprise infrastructure setup or can be used for consumer facing web-based applications.

TringMe's Mobile VoIP client can be easily configured without downloading anything. We can remotely configure your mobile to use TringMe by merely sending you a special SMS. This is a novel way for a user to start using the mobile device without having to spend any time configuring the device settings for using TringMe. Alternately, you can also download TringMe’s Symbian client (which will be available soon) from our website to enable Mobile VoIP on your Mobile and leverage additional functionality (e.g. sending an SMS over IP) from it.

With Mobile VoIP support, using your mobile, you can connect to your friends not just on landlines and cellular device, but also on IMs like Gtalk. Essentially, all termination points that are accessible by TringMe widgets from a PC are available via Mobile VoIP as well. This has been one of the key requests from many users of TringMe and hence we are extremely delighted to provide the same.

We also added speech recognition (ASR) capability in TringSwitch thereby making it convenient for TringMe users to initiate voice-based actions. New innovative applications like voice-enabled yellow page, voice enabled vertical searches, interactive games etc can be developed quickly with TringSwitch with almost no effort or coding.

We are very happy to announce that TringMe was selected as one of the companies which should demonstrate it's capabilities at HeadStart (http://www.headstart.in) which is going to be held from Jan 18th to Jan 20th in IISc, Bangalore, India. If you are attending HeadStart, please stop by for our demo. We will demonstrate TringSwitch including TringMe's Mobile VoIP capabilities. We will also show how to develop a rapid prototype application using TringSwitch and Speech Recognition in merely a few minutes without any coding efforts.

We look forward to seeing you at Headstart and thanks again for your continued support and suggestions. Write to us: bizdev@tringme.com


Feel free to let us know if you need any assistance.

Regards,
TringMe Support
http://www.tringme.com/

2 comments:

  1. as both a tringme beta tester and a ribbit developer I have to say that tringme appears to be going on a far more 'open' route. the ribbit model if for each and every call to pass through there servers using proprietary protocols and are discussing somewhat restrictive types of pricing models. tringme seems far more willing to 'work with' customers to brings calls through there own platforms wherever in the world they are operating. ribbit on the other hands seems to believe that they can deliver 'high value applications' through web based softphones and customers will be willing to pay a significant price premium over other VOIP options as a result. they have stated directly to there developers that they will not be offering calls at skype or jajah level pricing(neither of which i consider inexpensive for VOIP) but that their customer will be willing to pay more because of the 'value' element. i see no future in expensive softphones(even if enterprises pay well above average for calls through traditional style handsets.) tringme on the other hand seems far more interested in providing value.

    both firms may have a hard time surviving after the release of pacifica.

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