Source: goebel.net

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Many people were wondering during the last two years how the Israeli mobile VoIP company Fringland Ltd. wants to make any money. Their versatile software works on virtually every platform and supports more than 1.000 mobile handsets. I heard that 200.000 new users sign up every month to Fring, as well as 80 companies which want to become a SIP affiliate. More than 500 SIP companies are already using the Israeli software as an easy to deploy solution for mobile VoIP, by sending a preconfigured Fring to their users’ handsets or telling their customers how to use it. Fring invested heavily in software development and has to channel the other 500 companies’ traffic over its own servers. Every voice connection goes first from the cellphone to Fring’s servers, no matter if it’s on Skype, SIP or Google Talk. Fring could take its share from the other companies’ earnings, but hey do it for free. Also there is no paid version of Fring. All these business ideas are still in the cloud.

So how does Fring want to make money?

The cell phone multi messenger, which also serves perfectly for nearly free VoIP calls over 3G, should soon be sponsored by advertising. At the OSiM World conference in Berlin I saw an unreleased software version with banner ads for McDonald’s in Fring’s chat window. In a former occassion I could already see advertising by Gillette. The Israeli company with $20 million in venture capital seems to finally care now for revenue streams. Although CEO Avi Shechter had told me in February in an interview at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress that the entire year of 2008 would be dedicated exclusively to software development and revenues would be irrelevant. "The McDonald’s banner ads are just a demonstration", said Fring’s cofounder Boaz Zilberman when we met in Berlin. So until now Fring makes no money from advertising but is proving the concept.

Fring with McDonald’s banner ad on a Nokia N95 8 GB | Foto: Markus Gbel

One problem is, says Boaz, that mobile advertising is not very common yet. The advertisers still don’t understand it and therefore employ only small budgets. But these small budgets would be eaten up immediately on the millions of daily Fring messages. That’s why the company is going for bigger clients and advertising networks like Doubleclick or others. Context sensitive advertising like at Google Mail is not on the agenda. "We would have to read every chat message", says Boaz. "But we don’t want that because it would hurt our users’ trust." The business model of another Israeli born company seems creepy to him: Pudding Media is even eavesdropping their users’ conversations to deliver targeted advertising at the computer screen during the phone calls.

Fring is now developing from a sole software for messaging and VoIP to an universal contact solution, which even keeps track of your buddies’ location by GPS. The latest version 3.36.6, which you can only download from Fring’s developer website, has already joined the menus for messengers and social networks. The boundaries between these categories are every time more blurry, because for instance Facebook is also an instant messenger now. In future software versions, every person should appear only once in Fring’s contact list. Until now some people appear twofold, threefold or even more times – because they are connected to Skype, MSN, ICQ or other services at the same time. One click at the buddy’s icon will start a chat, no matter which messenger to other person is using, which can always be escalated into a Fring phone call via VoIP.

Source: gigaom.com

Source: goebel.net

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Does anybody know the new VoIP startup Dringg? They make me very courious with their announcements. The Facebook site of Jeff Heubo, CEO and Co-Founder, says;

Keep your cell/landline device(s) & phone number(s).
Our ambition is to build a "Free Call Network" so that anyone could use his or her cell/landline phone to reach worldwide cells & landlines at zero cost.
No download – No Pin – No Wifi or 3G – No Java.

"Dringg is a fast, free and easy way to call family & friends’ cells / landlines from yours, no matter where they’re physically located", says the company’s website. But so far that’s the only useful information. Sounds quite interesting, but I have no idea what’s behind it. The company seems to be located now in San Francisco, CA. But the founders are from France.

Dring project was fully initiated by Jeff Heubo & Stephane Orey, both friends and co-workers in La Defense, the biggest European Business Center.

Jeff and Stephane studied Business & Telecom Engineering. After a few years un Spain & the US, idea came to build a free alternative to paid calls so that people could just Dringg themselves from their existing landlines and cells.

Obviously they are paving the way for a launch and seed pieces of information to create interest. Jeff Heubo invited me to be one of the first Alpha testers and says that it deals with free calls. But he doesn’t tell more and hopes I understand that. A hint could be his Twitter page which says at the top:

Never be first to market, make something good Greater
Steve Chazin

So what kind of business is Dringg improving? Jajah? Pudding Media? Yak4ever? Maybe Jeff Pulver shouldn’t have headed to Israel to hunt for talents, but better contacted these two French guys.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

London based Uber Analyst (I rank him alongside pal Martin Geddes as bringing sense to all the hype) Dean Bubley has two posts this week (well actually many more) that are home runs in my book.1) His post of the Comcast packet sniffing soon to be fiasco. I say “soon to be” because you can’t go into continual PR denial, then try to spin things to get the story out. I mean how many weeks passed by when the story first broke in the blogs, then the Associated Press broke it big time.It’s time the publicly traded companies started to realize that this kind of obfuscation (my old argumentation Professor Towne would be proud here) is akin to a forward looking statement and thus as much a SOX issue as it is a truth in advertising issue. Maybe its time the FCC/FTC and SEC all got on the same page and looked closer at Comcast by convening a joint task force to investigate their departmental process of “we have to ask before we comment” type of approach. Heck, just imagine if they brought in DOJ and look at RICO (racketeer influenced criminal organization) statutes too, and you found that process, form and custom all smack of a system of keeping things a certain way that may not be in the best interest of the customer, public or even society. HMMMTo my friends at Comcast–this is too easy of a problem to fix. Just at the outset admit what you are doing by selling or offering tiered service. For the people who want to use P2P services raise your prices and offer it, instead of selling a speed boost package that sniffs.2) Dean’s second post is a beauty. It’s about Pudding Media (the start up with the dumbest name in VoIP) Dean has the same questions I have about the service.The idea of offering a free service in exchange for ads only attracts the no pay crowd unless its done right. Personally, I don’t see the future mash up of Meebo, Tok Box and Pudding by investor Sequoia as being that compelling. Ike Elliott’s post on Free is Not a model pretty much sums up what I’ve been saying for years on Ken Radio..about the “If It’s Free It’s Me, If I Gotta Pay It’s No Way” crowd.I mean, what media planner in their right mind wants a 4-6 percent conversion user base after years of free use? With 4-6 percent conversion, which is what those who know say is normal on the uptake rate for getting someone to subscribe, that means if you go pay only the other 90+ percent either never pay, or go elsewhere to the next free service to come along.