Ribbit Mobile Targets Google Voice

Google Voice has long threatened other VOIP providers – Google Voice Killing Skype made sense, but there’s something to compete:  Ribbit Mobile.

Ribbit Mobile is a cloud-based VoIP telephony service that brings together web-based calling, smart call routing and voicemail transcriptions – Just like Google Voice does.

Just like Google Voice, Ribbit gives users a new phone number or they can use call forwarding to transfer calls from their mobile phones to Ribbit’s platform.

Ribbit Mobile has few unique features [that Google doesn’t offer], like the ability to ring different phones simultaneously and to make calls from within the browser.

However, the bad part is GrandCentral offered some of the features that Ribbit Mobile now offers. Google dropped quite a few useful features like simultaneous rings and call chains from Google Voice’s feature line-up.

Besides call chains, another nice feature of Ribbit Mobile is that you can choose which number will appear on your contacts’ phones when you call, even if you are calling from your computer. Once you are on a call, you can also easily transfer calls from any device to another. Because of this, you can start a call in the web interface or iGoogle and then continue the call on your cell phone.

Caller ID 2.0
Ribbit Mobile, unlike others, doesn’t just display a caller’s name and phone number. Users can also add notes to every call and connect their Ribbit address book with their Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr accounts. Through this, the Ribbit team noted, conversations can now take place within a context.

Voicemail
The service offers two levels of Voicemail transcriptions. There are two variants, however,  Free accounts, come with automated transcriptions, Professional accounts (free during the beta period)  can also choose to have ‘business-class’ level transcriptions, where a human checks the computer-transcribed text and edits it.

Developer Program
Because Ribbit is an open platform, developers can use the service in their own applications. Ribbit already features Five apps in its App Store, including an SMS widget, an Adobe AIR app for checking voicemails and a conference widget. Ribbit also plans to launch its own mobile applications for the iPhone and Blackberry platforms soon, just like Googel voice. Developers, just like iphone App Store, are free to charge for their applications.

Ribbit will slowly raise the scale and no.of users and eventually move out of beta over a month. To begin with, you can signup for a Ribbit account here.

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