9th
“The story goes on to state the the primary reason behind the acquisition is to build a GrandCentral competitor. I say bullsh*t:
1. You could replicate GrandCentral for way less than $55 million. All praise due to Craig Walker and his team, but a web integrated find-me-follow-me application doesn’t take $55 million to build.
2. I’m a GrandCentral user, and really enjoy it, but GrandCentral has been languishing for the past year. There’s no sense in competing with something that isn’t winning.
3. It doesn’t pass Occam’s razor: there’s a simpler reason why BT would buy Ribbit. If BT recognizes that their Enterprise customers will deploy communications enabled business process applications, and Ribbit has some 3,000 developers already, and it looks like Adobe Flash has more traction than (ick) SOAP… you get the picture.”
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I have not confirmed myself if Ribbit has sold to BT but a few places like TechCrunch are reporting it. Thomas made a great point about why the acquisition took place (if it did) and like Thomas I strongly feel it had nothing to do with GrandCentral, Ribbit’s strength was that they built a platform for developers.