Big news for one of the shining lights in the VOIP, Flex and AIR world this morning. Ribbit was acquired by BT. The purchase price was $105 Million. It seem like BT was interested in not only the technology but the platform and community that Ribbit has created.

Ribbit has been acquired by BT one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services. This marks the most important day yet in Ribbit’s history. As part of BT will be able to more quickly extend our vision beyond Silicon Valley and bring our products and technology to the entire world. We couldn’t be more excited than to announce this new partnership.

CNet has good coverage of the acquisition and quotes JP Rangaswami, managing director of service design at BT:

"The telcos have lost control of the device. When you start building genuinely agnostic services, when you don't know the target device, it requires a different form creativity," he said. It's a move from closed networks to more open software platforms, and part of BT's transformation from a telco to a platform-based, software-driven services company. "Everything we do at BT is embeddable as workflow for customers. Voice is a feature embedded in the workflow,"

Ryan Stewart is doing some live interview on uStream.tv right now. Check it out.

Stream videos at Ustream

I'll remove the embed after today.

The Ribbit developer blog has some details on what this means to RIA developers and folks who're going to be using Ribbit:

The announcement is huge for our developer community. The joint platform means we’ll be able to deliver more features to the developer community. In addition to existing telephony services like making/receiving phone calls, checking/recording/reading voicemail, speech to text, and managing contacts, new & notable features will include:

- SMS/Text messaging >> Send SMS and text messages for a Ribbit application.
- Inline Registration >> The ability to create new users without leaving your application
- uPhone API Set >> Allows multiple logins and calls from a single deployed widget on any web page
- 3rd Party Call Control >> In addition to placing a call directly from your app, the user can also place a call from their device to someone else’s.
- Call Flow Management >> Telephone user interface management (press 1 for…) and call scheduling
- Text to Speech

Congrats guys! I think acquisitions like this go along way to proving to the rest of the world the cutting technologies like Flex are solid and worth investing in.

Read more from Andre Charland.