We’re Dropping Our India Rates To Celebrate Diwali October 28th, 2010  

Call India with Rebtel during Diwali for 1.5¢

For the past couple of years, we’ve tried doing something special for all our Indian users across the world celebrating the annual festival of light. These celebrations, which occur on November 5 this particular year, are also know as Diwali and are recognized as a national holiday in a number of countries including India, Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, Mauritius, Malaysia, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Myanmar , Fiji and Surinam.

For those of you that didn’t know, Diwali in Hinduism, marks the return of Lord Rama to his kingdom of Ayodhya, after slaying Ravana, the demon king and ruler of Lanka, in the epic known as Ramayana.

This year, we’re lowering our rates for calls to mobiles as well as landlines to an all time low of 1.5¢ per minute. As opposed to previous years, when only new users could benefit from our dropped Diwali rates, every single one of our users calling to India are, starting from today, able to call for this new 1.5¢ rate. Please do note that after November 28, the rate will change and stay at 1.79¢.

I’m a new user and want to call for 1.5¢ per minute, what do I do?

If you’re yet to sign up for Rebtel and want to call for 1.5¢ rate, go ahead and sign up right now. Don’t forget that you get a free call when you sign up, so you don’t have to make any deposits to try Rebtel out.

I’m an existing user and want to call for 1.5¢ per minute, what do I do?

If you’re an existing user, you don’t really have to do anything. Just continue calling as usual and enjoy super cheap calls India for an entire month.

Happy Diwali everyone!

By: alexander drewniak Tags: , ,

How To: Add Pseudo-SIP Support To Skype Using iNum & Rebtel For Free October 11th, 2010  

Even though the title of this past might be discouraging to some users, we know for a fact that there are a lot of VoIP whizzes out there that would appreciate us sharing more advanced and creative ways of using the Rebtel service from time to time.

Having that said, we figured a good start would be recommending this very nice post written by the great people over at TruVoIPBuzz. It does a great job of taking you through process of adding (pseudo) SIP support to Skype for no cost using an iNum number and the Rebtel Computer Calls feature.

We think this is a rather nifty trick, and what it essentially does is offer you a way to be accessible to your friends and family on Skype without actually having to be online.

Be sure to check it out and let us know how it goes!

By: alexander drewniak Tags: , , , , ,

Rebtel At GigaOM Mobilize Conference October 8th, 2010  

Last week, myself, Andreas, Patric and Hjalmar from the Rebtel team had the pleasure of flying over from cold and gloomy Stockholm to sunny San Francisco, California to attend the annual GigaOM Mobilize conference.

In addition to having our own nice little booth, where spoke to fellow industry peers about our service, the future of the calling as well as handed out really cool Rebtel mini-footballs (they were a big hit), we also organized a workshop and saw Andreas, our CEO, give a very interesting talk on what the calling industry will look like in the future and what companies have the best prerequisites to succeed in this space.

A couple of noteworthy takeaways from the talk are that international consumer calling has grown a from 10 billion minutes in 1990 to a remarkable 400 billion today. This growth can largely be attributed to the huge number of people moving from emerging countries to Europe or the USA, and they have, just like the rest of us, a very strong and inherent need for finding cheap, honest and reliable calling services that can help them to keep in touch with their loved ones back home. In addition, there’s been an enormous growth in mobile subscriptions in the countries where people have been moving from.

Andreas also touched on how wonderful technology is in the way that it shifts the power back to us; the consumers of the world. Just as what the digital age has done to industries such as retail, finance and travel, it’s now doing the same for the calling industry.

10 of the largest operators in the world have more than half of all mobile subscribers combined, and their problem is that they can’t quite wrap their heads around what consumer really want. We think that a good starting point is to assume that it’s good quality, low cost, transparency, simplicity and flexibility.

These are a few of the assumptions that the Rebtel service has been built on, and we hope that all the operators out there will understand that it’s not feasible (or very nice) to ensure that customers stay with you by tying them to your service 24 months at a time.

If you’re interested in finding out more about people’s international calling habits, feel free to check out our study on international calling habits that we did with Harris Interactive a few weeks ago.

By: alexander drewniak Tags: , , , , , , ,