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Ribbit to bring voice to Web developers

A start-up this week showed off its "Phone Component" that will let users click on a number to make Internet calls. A beta is due in October.

Martin LaMonica Former Staff writer, CNET News
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer covering green tech and cutting-edge technologies. He joined CNET in 2002 to cover enterprise IT and Web development and was previously executive editor of IT publication InfoWorld.
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Martin LaMonica

A company called Ribbit came out of stealth mode this week, showing off a "phone component" that will let developers embed Internet calling into Web applications.

Company executives showed off the Ribbit Phone Component at the 360 Flex conference in Seattle earlier this week. The Ribbit application is written in Flex, Adobe's development tool used for writing Web applications, including those that use Flash.

"The Ribbit Phone Component will give rich Internet application developers the ability to make and receive calls, record/send and receive voice mail, as well as add and manage contacts," according to a description on the company blog.

A schedule posted on Ribbit's site indicates that a beta version of the product will be released in October.

The Ribbit Phone Component appears to be competing with the developer tools available for the popular voice over IP service Skype. On the consumer end of things is YackPack, which allows end users to drop embed code into Web sites for voice calls.

In the company blog, Ribbit said that its component will allow users to click on a phone number in a Web page to make a call.

There are other communications features as well, including the ability to integrate voice mail and contacts.

Last year, there were reportsthat Adobe was building voice-over-IP capability into its Flash Player.