BT and Ribbit

I see my friend, JP Rangaswami, managing director of service design at BT, is behind their acquisition of Ribbit for $105m. See the FT’s Ribbit’s smart switch to BT. "Ribbit’s key technology is a “SmartSwitch” that handles the complexities of mobile, fixed and internet telephony, allowing developers to master just a few simple commands to bring voice to any web page or web application". BT says Ribbit helps in its strategy to become ‘a next-generation, platform-based, software-driven, services company’. (Ed - This contains far too many hyphens to make much sense to me!)

If the aim in this is for BT to build an ‘open systems’ development environment to rival Apple’s or Google’s (or Microsoft’s or Symbian’s) mobile operating environments, I think they have a really tough task ahead.