If you've been hiding under a rock for the last year or so, Ribbit is a platform for voice - a strong platform that allows developers to manage and process voice content in ways we couldn't before. Ribbit is well positioned to radically change the way we view voice communication, and if you're a developer you should probably dig into it. Besides learning a great technology, there's $100,000 in it for you if you can make something good. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The obvious use case for a technology like Ribbit is a customer service portal on your website. You give your users a "click here to call", and they call customer service straight through their website. This seems to be what most people think of when they think of Ribbit - making phone calls through website. Skeptics might be thinking, "why is that useful? I don't even service customers, and even if I did they'd have phones - why would I make them call through my website?" I'm glad you asked - the obvious use case is boring, and thankfully Ribbit goes way beyond that.

Ribbit's company goals contain, among other things, breaking your voice content out of your device. Why is your voice communication tied to, limited by, and really owned by a certain cell phone carrier? Why do they have total control over your voice mail messages? Why can't you archive and search your voice mail? These are just some of the problems Ribbit aims to solve.

One of the ways Ribbit is doing this is through their custom speech-to-text technology. Sure, there are plenty of transcribers out there that will turn a recording into words, but how many of them do it well? And how many of them are integrating with an existing voice communication API? Very very few, and Ribbit is one of them.

So what can you do with Ribbit? It goes way beyond that boring use case we talked about before. Here's just one of the ideas I've had during the last week - you can have it for free:

Imagine getting a call at your desk, but it's on your computer instead of a land-line (a la Skype.) You don't want to take it there because you're about to leave, so you pass the call seamlessly to your mobile (a la...nothing.) You take the call in your car, answer your client's questions or something like that, and then hang up. You want to leave yourself some to-do notes, so load up your favorite todo application and Ribbit translates your items into saved text. A week later, now back at your computer, you're checking off the items and you remember something you forgot - something about a "carrot." You load up the saved text version of the call and search for "carrot." Ribbit powers this whole new workflow in the background, with a set of developer-built applications on the front.

This is why I think Ribbit is a big deal - because it's well poised to empower new workflows for all sorts of different businesses. It's well positioned to change the way we think about voice communications, and break them out of their non-persistent phone-based world and into all of the great things we're already doing to process and archive information.

But Ribbit is just a platform - all of these great new workflows depend on developers like you and me building sweet apps that leverage it. Lucky for us, Ribbit recognizes that, and is kicking things off with a $100,000 developer challenge. Build a killer app and not only might you change the way many people communicate, but you might not have to work for a year. Get on it.

For more information on why Ribbit is important, check out this post on the Ribbit blog.

Read more from RJ Owen.