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Ribbit, which bills itself as “Silicon Valley’s first phone company,” has been getting a lot of positive attention. The Mountain View startup has created a platform that allows developers to integrate users’ phones into their web applications with minimal fuss. Tomorrow, Ribbit plans to launch Ribbit for Salesforce, the first big showcase of what its platform can do.

As the name implies, Ribbit for Salesforce is an enterprise application that brings a number of useful voice features into Salesforce’s customer relationship management service. Although Ribbit can integrate all of your phone numbers into Salesforce, Enterprise General Manager Greg Goldfarb says the product is particularly groundbreaking when it comes to mobile. Not only is Ribbit the first company to offer mobile voice automation in Salesforce — it’s actually the first product that brings together mobile voice automation and any kind of software-as-a-service.

In a nutshell, Ribbit for Salesforce transforms phone calls into another data object that users can interact with. It automatically logs all calls and voice messages; users can then see all of their voice correspondence with a specific customer, or all correspondence related to a specific campaign. Ribbit can also transcribe your calls and messages, making them searchable and easily readable when you’re in a meeting or tight for time. It even includes a phone emulator, so that you can make or receive calls while within Salesforce from any of your numbers — particularly useful if your cell phone is dying or you can’t get any signal.

Chief executive Ted Griggs says Ribbit for Salesforce was designed to show off the platform’s enterprise capabilities. There’s certainly room for developers to create similar offerings with other CRM, SaaS and platform-as-a-service products, such as SugarCRM and Oracle On Demand. And it looks like the Salesforce showcase may be a nice little revenue generator itself. Seventy companies signed up while Ribbit for Salesforce was in private testing mode, and some of them have already started paying subscription fees. The basic rate will be $25 per user per month, but that only covers five transcriptions. Since transcriptions are one of the most useful features, I bet a lot of customers will be signing up for the voice-to-text upgrade, which costs an extra $10 per user.

Ribbit will be be launching a consumer showcase product, called Amphibian, in June. With 4,000 developers using the platform already, it looks like the company is well on its way to building a thriving community.

Update: From some of the talk I’ve heard, it sounds like like I need to be crystal clear about the fact that VentureBeat did not break this story, and did not break embargo on this story. We only published our article after several other venues had done so, including IDG and Mashable.

This is probably too much “insider baseball” for most of our readers, but it’s important that everyone understands that we take news embargoes very seriously. I’ve never broken an embargo, and to the best of my knowledge, VentureBeat hasn’t either.

Ribbit is a remarkable new company, and it knows it: It calls itself “Silicon Valley’s first phone company.”

That sounds like marketing overreach for a young company barely launched, but when you look at what it’s doing, you can see why they can get carried away.

Ribbit, based in Mountain View, Calif., has developed technology, built on years of prior work of its founders, that lets a developer insert phone software into any Web application. The developer doesn’t have to know anything about phones.

The end result, Ribbit predicts, will be thousands of useful applications for regular people. Ribbit’s applications let you make calls from any page, direct your calls from your own phone to any Web page, and gives you a way to manage it all in new ways. You can transcribe it all into text, search it, and use it to see other kinds of information. Because it can integrate into any application, Ribbit can do things like peer into your friends’ MySpace, Flickr or other accounts, pulling your friends’ latest blogs or photos, so you can consult it all even as your friend calls you on the Web phone.

The company first launched in December, as a platform designed for developers building phone-based applications for large companies. To showcase this, Ribbit built Ribbit for Salesforce, which adds voicemail, memos and calling to your Salesforce account, so you can manage all your clients with your web-based phone. The person who built the application, a former Salesforce engineer, knew nothing about phones.

Today, at the DEMO conference, Ribbit announces the launch of a platform for consumer applications. It’s called Amphibian, and it already has some notable applications on display. About 2,500 developers are building Ribbit applications, the company tells VentureBeat. There’ the Ribbit version of the Adobe AIR iPhone, which builds on the popular application AIRiPhone. Thae original application features an iPhone suspended in the air on a Web page, and lets you play with its data, turn it around and so on. Ribbit’s application, however, has added a way to include your own phone’s features within it and make calls.

There’ also the Chalkboard phone, which lets you make calls from your computer with a Flash-based phone, designed like a chalkboard. See iGoogle screenshot here.

The company was co-founded CEO Ted Griggs and Crick Waters. They spent nine months researching how people used phones. They noted how people use a cellphone and VoIP services from their computer, but that these two services were in silos. Services Jajah and Skype are good at letting you make cheap VOIP calls, but they aren’t designed to be inserted in other applications. The Ribbit founders also noticed that each large company needs phone features to work in different applications, tailored to the company’s specific workflow needs, and that it cost at least $250,000 to build phone features to fit into their application set.

So Ribbit decided to make it very easy: Provide an API to let non-phone experts build phone features on their own, allowing them to put them on any Web page and tie them into any application. Former AT&T and Sprint product executives, they recruited some Web 2.0 engineers from Yahoo and eBay to help them.

Griggs earlier founded a company called Junction, a VoIP software company that was merged with Summa Four, and which was sold to Cisco in the late 1990s. Ribbit’s core invention is something called a telephone “soft switch,” so called because it is a piece of software that can manage phone calls. Griggs built the basis of it at his most recent company, Syndeo. That company received $98 million in investment during the Internet boom years, but had struggled during the downturn and slow buildout of new networks in the U.S. It was a carrier grade phone switch, used in Japan for VoiP, but it was otherwise neglected. So Griggs acquired the intellectual property for the switch. It was built to work with any major protocol: SIP, PSTN, etc. Rejigged for Ribbit, this means it can call fixed line numbers, mobile phones, but also Skype, GoogleTalk, or MSN — all voice networks running proprietary protocols.

The Ribbit team added a flash interface, to handle calls from within any browser, so that it can work from almost any kind of data object, including jpegs and more. This lets you take messages, transcribe voice into text (using an application called Simulscribe), search it, add directory services, integrate it with Plaxo so you can manage your contacts, and more.

Applications are built with Adobe’s Flex development tools.

Ribbit recently raised $10 million in a second round of capital led by Allegis Capital, and joined by KPG Ventures participating. This follows $3 million raised from Alsop Louie Partners more than a year ago.

Ribbit charges developer a fee: $25 a month for the basic integration. Additional charges are made services such as voice mail, contact management and transcription services, call logs, provisioning and billing. Building applications is free, but once an application is being used for commercial purposes, Ribbit charges. It also charges the developer for the calls: $30 a month for up to 20 people using the service. The developer can charge their own clients as they want.Ribbit also lets developers sell applications to consumers from a Ribbit store. These apps are analogous to ringtones — except they are phone applications instead. For example, there’s Ribbit Earth, which shows a globe and colored lines connecting the places you are calling. Developers can charge consumers whatever they want. If the developer charges $2.99, he keeps 80 percent of that, and Ribbit takes 20 percent.

Here’s how it works for you, the consumer. You provide our phone number, and Ribbit looks up your carrier, and then gives you a simply set of instructions to forward your calls to the service. When you get an incoming call to your phone, you can do one of two things: You can answer it, and talk as normal. Or, if you ignore the call, it goes to Ribbit’s platform, and it can then go to any Ribbit enabled page you’ve chosen to place your Web phone. It can go to your Salesforce dashboard, for example, where you can manage incoming business calls, and see audio files or see them transcribed. Or you can have it go to your MySpace or other page (see screenshots here).

Ribbit also offers a social network features, too. When receiving a call from a friend, you can have Ribbit call up the feeds from that friend (your friend’s blog, LinkedIn account, Flickr, YouTube, etc) so that you can see what he or she has been up to lately, right when you’re talking with them.

There are 78 companies presenting at the DEMO conference this week. We’ll be covering some of the more notable ones in separate posts.

First, we’ve picked out 16 of them here for brief overview: Yoics, Acesis, Asankya, Atlaspost, Bitgravity, Cozimo, Healthpricer, Hubdub, Huddle, Squidcast, Standoutjobs, , Youchoose, Zodiac-interactive, Skyfire, Scenecaster and Ribbit.

YOICS, a Palo Alto, Calif., company, makes any network-connected device remotely accessible via a Web page. You can grant others access to it too. You can view webcams on your mobile phone, for example. It says it makes such access “as easy as instant messaging.” Any folder or service on your computer can become a server accessible from anywhere on the Internet. Yoics is free.

ZODIAC INTERACTIVE, of Valley Stream, New York, is launching Zodigo, a service that allows you to search for content for your mobile phone from existing cable set-top boxes and networks. Zodigo helps you find games, ringstones, podcasts, manga and more recommended by like-minded people.

ACESIS of Mountain View, Calif., hopes to make adopting electronic medical-record systems as painless as possible for physicians and small medical groups. The company’s avowedly flexible and adaptive system involves digital forms that aim to be faster and more reliable than paper charts, reconfigure themselves to fit a patient’s specific medical situation and can be extended or revised on the fly. The company is targeting smaller doctors’ offices that lack dedicated IT staff, and which as a result have been slow to adopt electronic-record keeping that can cut down on medical errors and improve coordination in patient care.

HEALTHPRICER, of Vancouver, aims to be the premiere comparison-shopping engine for health products — everything from prescription drugs and dietary supplements to contact lenses, cold medicine and face washes. The Vancouver startup gets commissions from merchants it features, but keeps the service free for users, and emphasizes that it offers no sponsored links or any other commercially motivated slant that might take away from its goal of making it easy to find the cheapest and best healthcare goods possible.

YOUCHOOSE, a Thornton, PA-based company, offers a universal commenting system. First, a blog chooses to embed the YouChoose widget to serve as the commenting section on all of its blog posts. Here’s the twist: Its widget come pre-set about specific topics, so blogs sharing interest in the widget topics can choose accordingly. Then, comments on any one post on one blog appear on all blogs that use the widget. It hasn’t launched yet, and we’ve yet to get a real look.

HUDDLE, based in London, offers the standard set of features that one sees in online project management software, such as task lists for groups, ways of assigning responsibilities to people, etc. It is most interesting because it is both a free-standing site and a Facebook application. The latter shows you a task list, where you can see the people in Facebook that you’re working with, as well as links to documents that you’re working on together, such as Word or Excel documents. (See our original coverage here.)

ASANKYA and BITGRAVITY — These are both data delivery companies. BitGravity, of Burlingame, Calif., which we’ve written about before, builds broadcast quality video delivery services. At DEMO, it launches BG LiveBroadcast, a flash-based streaming service. Asankya, of Atlanta, Georgia, meanwhile, says it wants to be the next Akamai. It provides high-quality real-time and two-way traffic over IP networks. The company’s technology, Packet Level Multi Pathing (PLMP) assesses the network in real time and directs each packet to avoid congestion that may impede streaming quality. Asankya works with ISPs. Its product is called Hypermesh, and says has developed new protocols.

SQUIDCAST, of San Francisco, allows users to send large media files including high-definition video and high-resolution photos for free. The company says it’s lowered infrastructure costs without compromising quality through its “Collaborative Relay Network,” which takes advantage of users’ storage and bandwidth to create a distribution network. A beta is launching simultaneously in the United States and Japan.

ATLASPOST is a Taiwanese company that lets users network on a global map. There’s nothing extraordinary about this company. Users can personalize their own neighborhoods on a standard Google map, placing images of buildings, animals or anything else they want — and then see who else is active doing similar things in their neighborhood. It offers map-based blogging and photo tagging.

HUBDUB, of Scotland, wants to get large numbers of users vote on the likelihood of certain events, hoping that their votes will, in sum, be predictive. You submit a question and other users vote on its likelihood. Example question: “After the emergency [interest rate] cut, will another cut be made to the Federal Funds rate at the scheduled meeting Jan 29/30?” The site includes links to relevant, timely news articles beneath the question, such as links to news stories about the Fed’s two percent rate last week. Problem: There are many, many examples of these so-called prediction markets already in practice. Wikipedia lists about a dozen. Most recently, there was Google’s prediction market for employees, designed to forecast things like product launch dates and new office openings.

STANDOUT JOBS, of Montreal, Canada, is launching Reception, a new job recruiting Web site where companies can use social networking tools to create an “employer brand.” Features include a career site that can be customized with polls, Q&As and comments; video capabilities; and metrics to evaluate the efficacy of job boards. After a free trial, Reception will cost users $149 per month. The site is launching with more than 20 employers including b5media, Freshbooks and Jangl.

RIBBIT, of Mountain View, has a platform that takes does the dirty work for developers who want to integrate voice into their applications, in exchange for a small cut of the profit. The platform is new, but a few useful-looking apps are already on it. Amphibian, lets developers create consumer applications to tie in your mobile phone to your internet experience, and Ribbit for Salesforce, adds voicemail, memos and calling to Salesforce.

SCENECASTER, of Ontario, Canada, is a startup whose Facebook application we briefly mentioned last year. The company allows users to build their own three-dimensional virtual room within social networks, populated with items like couches and carpets. It’s now expanding to other sites, including Flickr, and adding to its capabilities, allowing users to link in media or web pages through 3D objects. A neat idea, although a look at the lengthy list of complaints on its Facebook app page shows that the company still has some work to do towards providing a simple enough experience to users.

SKYFIRE, of Mountain View, says it can provide a full web-browsing experience on any smartphone — with no need for .mobi versions of webpages, and no processing issues or hiccups. It wants to let you watch videos, listen to music, or do anything else you can do on a computer. Initial reports suggest it actually works as promised, which is more than can be said for other mobile web-browsing applications.

COZIMO, of Berkeley, Calif., lets video producers and film makers collaborate remotely online, allowing users to comment, mark-up and discuss images and video files. It lets people work in groups and provides notification and project management features. Screenshot below.