Ribbit for $105m to BT (UK)

Silicon Valley’s first phone company, Ribbit has been bought by one of the world’s oldest phone companies BT, for $105m.  JP Rangaswami, managing director of service design at BT said that We could have built a device-specific platform like Apple did, we could have built a platform for creating ads – Google might call it Android but I guess we think it should be spelt Ad-droid – or we could have been like AT&T and just provided the pipes for these people to work from,” he said.

But we felt telephony and software were now one and the same thing, and we wanted to be with people who had that same vision that it was going to be a converged world.”
Ribbit will allow partners with others and insisting on maintaining its autonomy.

Ribbit had realised it needed access to a global network to grow and BT gave it immediate access to 178 countries, told Teg Griggs, Chief Executive, Ribbit. We feel BT will benefit because they want to push the software side of the business, we’ll continue to establish partnerships and BT is encouraging us to do so, ” he further added.
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