The rate of evolution in the VoIP market would surely make Darwin's head spin and the latest entry into this market would probably blow his mind. The recently-launched Ribbit company bills itself as "Silicon Valley's First Phone Company." Like Skype, Ribbit's system supports softphones, but unlike Skype Ribbit isn't a closed system. An interesting issue is that being based on Flash/Flex technology no installation is required as it is completely Web-based - an interesting and potentially powerful advantage over Skype.

The company’s architectural platform diagram shows support for interoperation with the public switched telephone network, SIP and - this is the biggie - with Skype.

As if all that wasn’t enough the company also plans to support Voice over instant messaging services (VoIM) including those provided by MSN, Yahoo, and XMPP-based systems which includes Google Talk and Jabber.

Ribbit’s platform design shows that it intends to provide all of the foregoing along with the features that a carrier-grade telephony solution requires such as billing, redundancy, and security.

The company’s goal is to create an open platform and Ribbit already has a developers' program in place with a documented API. Note that the API is currently focused only on support for Adobe’s Flash and Flex technologies.

When they go live Ribbit plans to offer a couple of softphones: A virtual iPhone-style softphone Ribbit calls Chalkboard. It also appears that the company plans to provide speech-to-text conversion as part of the service!

Ribbit is aiming not only for developers but also for business users and consumers. Services will be free for consumers and “pro” offerings will be available for an as yet unspecified pricing. Developer accounts are free.

So far there’s not a lot of meat and the Web site is long on hype (avoid the videos, they really are ‘fluff’) but the pitch is compelling and if Ribbit manages to fire up its services as planned in the first quarter of 2008 this market could really heat up. Definitely a Web application to watch.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.