This is starting to become a habit: Another large European telecom company is buying an Internet startup.
Last Week, the Business Technology Blog sat with France Telecomm’s chief executive, Didier Lombard, who ventured to the U.S. to promote a new book about the necessity for phone companies to play a bigger role in the Web 2.0 world.
Someone at British Telecom must have bought a copy (or read this blog): The company just acquired Ribbit, a service that allows users to place voice functionality into Internet applications, for $100 million. Someone using Ribbit can make phone calls through a Web browser or while working on a SAP document.
Apart from the technology, the start-up has about 5,000 members of its developer community all tinkering around to find new and innovative services to sell to consumers. The two-year-old company opened the community about five months ago and swiftly saw the numbers increase. The growth was part of why British Telecom acquired Ribbit. J.P. Rangaswami, managing director of service design for British Telecom, tells the Business Technology Blog that the company started its own developer community about a year ago and has about 9,000 members.
“We’ve seen Apple and Nokia innovate around devices, Google innovate around connectivity,” Rangaswami tells us. “Our fear is to be relegated to just providing access to the internet.”
Rangaswami says bureaucratic infighting had set in amongst the different business units in BT, just as the Web 2.0 movement began to pick up steam. So, last year the company restructured into just two units to tackle the issue. The recent acquisition is further evidence of the changing nature of communications. “We’ve finally grasped the idea that convergence is finally happening,” says Rangaswami.
