Over at Skypejournal, Jim Courtney is reflecting on the scarcity of compelling VOIP applications and, indeed, mash-ups. Of course, his perspective is that of the rich mash up culture that exists around Skype Extras, but I have a hard time calling these “VOIP applications”. It’s clear, that the release of the Facebook API has caused a monumental shift, for us, at Rebtel too: we released our first Facebook Application in August and are now planning the release of a further release before October. For us, the question is, and always has been: how can we add value to our users’ experience of using VOIP? Our approach has always been to use VOIP technology in an invisible and transparent manner. Early on we decided that making calls tethered to computers or headsets was not a route we were going to take. The beauty of Rebtel is its simplicity: you use your mobile phone as you have always done, use your address book as you have always done. Simple and elegant. To us, enhancements are refinements of that basic proposition, not adding bells and whistles to what is a bloated product to begin with. It’s all very well that I can open a mobile browser page to initiate VOIP calls, but what if I don’t have 3G coverage? I have tried iSkoot and Jajah’s mobile offerings, but they fail where reliability of service is concerned, because none of those applications enable you to use your phone for what it was intended.
I think it is Jeff Pulver who raised the stakes by offering a reward for “cool” VOIP apps. It’s true, there is a quest for coolness here, coolness meaning anything that is not “Call Forwarding and/or Voicemail” in Jeff’s words. So, what would be compelling then?. Jeff writes:
(…) after listening to Brian Whitton speak, it became clear to me there is still a great opportunity to disrupt the communications industry, if for no other reason, than because of the amount of business processes in place at Verizon (and other incumbent Telcos) before a new service is deployed. In fact, in the time it takes for the financial analysts at Verizon work out the operating budgets for doing a voice over ATM rollout and the time engineering spends trying to justify the “risks†for deploying an IP Voice solution, the seed of a communications revolution could planted and sown. All it takes are like minded people who want to change the way we communicate and the guts to take on the status-quo. And what is better than the present time to reboot and restart the Internet Communications revolution?
Well, yes. However, rebooting in this business to us means giving people the easiest means to accessing VOIP from their ordinary phones. After all VOIP is but a technology for transferring Voice over IP: it’s not a service in and of itself. I would guess that more than 90% of mobile calls are initiated from our phones’ address books. Increasingly, people have free local minutes included in their calling plans. We figured it would be cool to turn those minutes into local calls, especially if you want to call internationally.
Sometimes I think “compelling” services are only compelling for those already in the know, the inner circle of VOIP watchers, so to speak. Twitter and Facebook are often mentioned, and Jeff mentions them too. If there’s one thing we’ve learned it’s that those services are so successful because they remove clutter and simplify things, while offering a wealth of access options to their basic service offering. It’s true, there’s a wealth of opportunity in VOIP, but it is through simplicity that the revolution will happen. Rebtel: simple stuff: use your address book to call your international contacts for next to nothing, or even free if you make smart calls. That’s cool enough for us.
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