Google's Kevin Marks Jumps to BT's Ribbit

BT announced that Kevin Marks has joined as vice president of Web services, reporting to JP Rangaswami, managing director of Service Design. Marks will be based in Mountain View at Ribbit, the company BT (News - Alert) acquired a year ago.

Rangaswami remarked that to date, telecommunications "have typically been walled off, limiting the possibilities for innovation and choice for consumers and the enterprise," but that Marks has "a long history of pursuing open standards and an open approach to communications." 

Marks said working with BT "is an opportunity to connect the solid engineering culture of BT with the open Web standards culture of Silicon Valley... connecting the mobile and Web worlds through an open platform, and making sense of them through social software and open initiatives is an exciting prospect." Before joining BT, he was Developer Advocate for OpenSocial at Google (News - Alert).

The Ribbit communications platform supports a global community of 15,000-plus application developers designing voiceware applications for consumers and enterprise. 

Ted Griggs, CEO at Ribbit, noted Marks's work with Apple (News - Alert), Google, and Technorati. Ribbit is a wholly owned subsidiary of BT.

In June TMC reported that Ribbit, which bills itself "Silicon Valley's first phone company," announced that Ribbit for Salesforce, an enterprise application to link mobile voice communications and Software as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) business workflow, registered more than 250 trial customers since the service became generally available in May.

This milestone comes "months ahead of schedule," Ribbit officials said at the time, following a private beta program involving nearly 100 businesses of different sizes and industries.

Ribbit has garnered third party recognition from a variety of sources. IDG's InfoWorld, an integrated media brand for IT decision makers, has selected Ribbit as one of their Top 10 Tech Startups for 2008.

Real estate is one market Ribbit for Salesforce has tackled. "We build Salesforce.com-powered tools for the real estate market," said Steve Kompolt, CEO, Real Intelligence, Inc. "Residential agents in particular are very mobile, and timely responses can make or break a deal."