Rebtel Blog

Tech Over Tyranny!

On the 12th of June, when the presidential elections in Iran took place, the people of the Islamic republic went out of their homes to cast their votes with hopes of seeing them amount to a democratically elected president of their country. Today, 10 days later, after seeing serious evidence of discrepancies surface, the entire country is in despair, people are in disbelief and no one can tell with absolute certainty what the future holds in store for the brave men and women of Iran taking a stand against tyranny, fraud and lies for the benefit of living freely under democratic and honest conditions.

Due to these recent developments, we announced earlier today that we have made the decision to give away a total of a quarter of a million free minutes to Iran. When Rebtel was founded in 2006, it was built with the vision of shrinking the world, making it a friendlier place, and to bring people from all over the world closer together by making all phone calls local. 3 years later we still stay true to that vision by doing what we believe should be expected of us not only as a company, but also as fellow human beings.

This opportunity to call Iran for no cost is available for all existing users as well as new users. No strings attached.

As a fair use policy, each and everyone that decides to redeem the voucher code will receive 15 minutes of free calls each. New users that are currently not Rebtel users will in addition also receive the usual 5 Welcome Minutes. Once redeemed, the 15 minutes to Iran will be valid for 14 days.

The voucher code will be redeemable starting today, Monday the 22nd of June, and will expire on Monday next week, 29th of June.

If you would like to help us spread the message to raise awareness and make sure as many people as possible get the chance make use of these minutes, please retweet this post with the hashtag #iranelection by clicking the button at the top of this post.

Follow these instructions if you have family or friends in Iran and want to make sure they are well:

Existing Users (15 minutes to Iran)

1. Go to http://www.rebtel.com/en/My-Rebtel/Buy-credit/
2. Click ‘Redeem now’ at the bottom of the page
3. Click the blue Rebtel heart, enter the voucher code iranelection and click ‘Redeem now’
4. Call your loved ones free of cost and make sure they are OK

New Users (15 minutes to Iran + 5 Welcome Minutes

1. Go to http://www.rebtel.com/
2. Click ‘Try Now’ and sign up with Rebtel
3. Go to http://www.rebtel.com/en/My-Rebtel/Buy-credit/
4. Click the blue Rebtel heart, enter the voucher code iranelection and click ‘Redeem now’
5. Call your loved ones free of cost and make sure they are OK

Iran Resources

To follow the developments in Iran on the web, we would like to refer you to the following resources:

- Iran Videos on YouTube

- Iran Images on Flickr

- #iranelection Twitter Search

Rebtel Adds Dominican Republic

In due time before this years World Baseball Classics, we are very proud to present our newest addition to the already stacked Rebtel family; the Dominican Republic.

The Dominican Republic is home turf to a number of the biggest and brightest shining stars that the Major League has to offer. Manny Ramirez, Miguel Tejada, and of course, the New York Yankee’s power-hitting third baseman with the richest contract in baseball history, Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez, are a few names that need no further introduction.

Starting from today, with a little help from Rebtel, A-Rod and everyone else living in one of our 51 Rebtel Countries are able to make super low-cost (or even completely free) calls back to their friends and family in the Dominican Republic. Regardless if you’re playing baseball or go to college, an extra motivational boost from hearing the voice of friends and family back home is always a good thing.

As the Dominican Republic now is a Rebtel Country, people in, for example New York, are now able to make Smart Calls to friends and family in Santa Domingo. They simply ask their friend – while staying on the line – to hang up and call right back using the Santa Domingo phone number displayed on the screen of their phone. Naturally, this can be done the other way around too.

Lastly, we want everyone to give the Dominican Republic a big warm welcome and wish good look to everyone competing in the Classics!

Introducing Rebtel SMS Beta

During the course of last year, we received boat loads of feature and general service improvement suggestions from you, our wicked cool users. We read all your emails, Get Satisfaction threads, Tweets and Fan Page wall posts. From the bottom of our baby blue Rebtel hearts we would like to thank you for all the efforts you’ve made to help us take Rebtel to the next level. Together we will do great things in 2009 and we have some pretty spectacular stuff to come. Thank you.

Out of all the cool stuff you wanted to see on Rebtel.com, SMS messages to Rebtel friends was one that kept popping up time and time again. Even though we love talking to people (especially when the calls are cheap or free) we get what you’re saying. Sometimes an SMS message is a better man for the job than a lengthy phone call. Therefore we would like for you to meet the newest addition to the family of Rebtel services; our SMS Beta.

With the SMS Beta you can send cheap text messages straight from your address book to Rebtel friends as well as any other random person that you have a mobile phone number to (we don’t condone random SMS messaging). If you’re eager to give this a go but don’t really know where to start, I took the liberty of preparing a short visual guide.

First off, log in to your Rebtel account. Once you have that out of the way go to your Contact List. You will now have to take a pretty big decision, namely who you will grace with the pleasure of receiving an SMS from you Once you’ve made up your mind, click on their name.

After the Contact Box has expanded, you will see a brand new option at the bottom that says ‘SMS’ and the name of your friend. Click this option to open up a Lightbox with the SMS Dashboard.

In my particular case, you can see that I have chosen to send my SMS to my Best Friend In The World. He’s the best. The drop down menu that specifies who the SMS is going out to is already defined as I previously clicked on this name. If  you would change your mind you can use this menu to pick another recipient of your message. As you go along and start typing, you will see that the character, cost and SMS counters will start ticking. If you exceed the standard SMS limit of 160 characters your message will be divided up in to two sendouts instead of one.

When you’re done typing your message, simply press ‘Send’. That’s all there is to it! Please note that you are not able to send SMS messages via Rebtel to friends and family in the U.S. This problem is naturally something that we’re working hard on to amend so plese bear with us. Lastly, since this is a Beta and all, we still have some kinks left in the chain to straighten out. If you stumble upon any funny bugs that are giving you a hard time, please do send an email our way.

Welcome Newcomers!

Up until today you’ve been able to use the fabulous Rebtel service from 47 countries world wide. We’ve had a great time together and we love all 47 of them equally. Just as if they were our own.

Today though, is a big day for us. We’re announcing 3 brand new additions to the Rebtel family; Panama, Malta and Puerto Rico. Obviously - we’re thrilled about this. We’re hoping that you, our wonderful users, as well as our older countries that has been with us for a little bit longer will make these newcomers feel welcome. Hjalmar Winbladh, our CEO, is so excited that he even decided to learn some Spanish He’s been running around the office for the last few days shouting “El pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido”.

In practice, these good news mean that all the wonderful people in Panama, Malta and Puerto Rico will be liberated at last from the tyranny of deceiving calling cards and the captivity of carriers with horrendously priced international calling rates. Thou shalt not fear - Rebtel has come to the rescue!

Naturally, if you live in any of the other 47 Rebtel countries you are now able to make Smarts Calls to friends, family or girlfriends living in any of the new countries.

Check out the rates below to get an idea of how much you’ll be able to save:

• Puerto Rico to any phone anywhere in the U.S. - $0.015 per minute.
• Panama to Colombia - $0.029 per minute to landlines; $0.095 per minute to mobiles.
• Malta to the U.K. - $0.019 per minute to landlines; $0.18 per minute to mobiles.

And for all new customers who sign up before December 18 the rates are even lower for their first 30 days of calling:

• Malta to the U.K. - $0.013 per minute to landlines; $0.126 per minute to mobiles.
• Puerto Rico to the U.S. - less than a penny per minute - $0.008 per minute to any phone.
• Panama to Colombia - $0.015 per minute to landlines; $0.067 per minute to mobiles.

To read more about our Cheapest Rates campaign, click here to read our post on the subject that touches on the subject in slightly greater detail.

As always, if you have any questions about Rebtel, be sure to check out our Get Satisfaction page.

Out With The Old - In With The New

Now it’s time to get a little sentimental (we’re emotional people so please bear with us). Rebtel was introduced in May of 2006 and it’s a sure thing to say that we’ve managed to come a long way since then. Throughout almost two and a half years millions of smart people around the globe have been connected with their friends, family and business acquaintances by trusting the Rebtel way of making international calls. For this we would like to thank you. We want to thank you for all the support and most importantly for taking a stand against all carriers that charge you those ridiculous rates when you want to call your mom back home. We’ve said from the start that we are in this to win this and we are more determined than ever to deliver on that promise. One day all calling will be free and you can consider yourself a big part of making that happen.

Now that we’re over and done with all the reminiscing, we can continue to checking out the new features on the Rebtel site. To get a visual of all the features, click on the thumbnail below and you’ll be taken to our Flickr page.

Visual of New Features

Enhanced contact management

• Tabbed Browsing

Some of you have contact lists that are pretty big. That’s not a hassle anymore since we’re introducing a completely new way to manage your contacts. The all-new ‘Favorites’ tab makes it easy to find the contacts you call most frequently. Simply click the star next to the name of your contact, and they’ll appear under your Favorites tab for easy access. You can also view a list of your recent activity, or click ‘All’ to see all your contacts in alphabetical order.

• Multi-Numbers

We’ve also made it much easier to store details for each contact. Previously, if you had two separate numbers for a contact - a mobile number and an office number, for example - the contact would appear in your contact list twice (not very convenient). So, instead of having multiple entries with the same name, you can now save several numbers under one contact name – this makes it much easier to find the right number you’re looking for.

• Rate Display

No more rushing off to the rates page to see the current price of calling to your friend - you now have all the rates handy right on your contacts page next to your friends local Rebtel number. This will make it so much easier for you to easily keep track of how you’re spending your Rebtel credit.

• Contact Search

You can instantly find who you’re looking for with just a few keystrokes - our seach engine will now return results to you before you’ve even finished typing the name. It’s also possible to search among your friends’ contact lists. No need to trouble your friend for a mutual friends number - you can easily find it yourself.

Collect Calls

Did you know that your contacts can call you collect? If they’re in a Rebtel country but don’t have a Rebtel account, they can call your Rebtel number and the call will be debited from your Rebtel account. This is a great way for people back home to get in touch with you if they’re for some reason unable to add credit.

If someone calls you collect, we’ll now ask your permission before connecting the call. We’ll also inform you of the per minute rate that will be debited from your account if you choose to accept the call. In your settings menu you can choose to always accept, always reject or if you to choose make that decision every time someone calls you collect. Now all of this is up to you.

Protect Your Privacy

Of course, it’s up to you how much info to share. You can fine-tune your settings to keep your original phone number private, only show it to your friends, allow your friend of a friend or even all the cool people that use Rebtel to see it to easily get a local Rebtel number for you. Now isn’t that so ace?

Share Rebel With Your Fiends

You don’t want to keep all the good thing to yourself, do you? We didn’t think so. Here at Rebtel we live by the motto “sharing is caring” and with regards to that, we’ve added more features to make it even easier to tell your friends about Rebtel. You can quickly track the status of your invites to see if your invites are pending, or if your friends have already signed up and started enjoying the benefits of making cheap calls.

That’s about it for now. I apologize for the long post but I really felt like telling you everything there is to say and not hold anything back All of us here at Rebtel sincerely hope you will enjoy all this new stuff and if you have any questions you can check out our Get Satisfaction page or send us an email to customerteam@rebtel.com

Has Rebtel made your life easier?

Here at Rebtel we get a lot of emails (with emphasize on a lot) from users around the world telling us what they think about what we do and most importantly; how we do it.

To be perfectly honest with you (and I’m saying this with the most humble tone of voice possible), a great majority of these emails say that we are really great. Just like everyone else we enjoy getting these kind of emails so by all means, please continue sending them

Although, every once in a while we do hear from people that aren’t as “happy go-lucky” as the other guy and don’t really feel like showering us with compliments. This is also totally cool with us.

The point is that regardless if you guys have something good or bad to say about us we still really want to hear about it. What’s more important, we want everybody else to hear about it as well. If you believe that we have solved a problem for you and made your life a tiny bit easier we want to make that publicly available for everyone to see.

With that said, we invite you to log on to www.getsatisfaction.com/rebtel and write something, good or bad, about Rebtel. It doesn’t have to be an academic essay with some in-depth analysis, a few sentences will do the trick and in return we will be eternally grateful

Have a great weekend guys!

Be a Nice Friend and Rebtel Citizen

It’s Friday today and yet another Rebtel week is coming to an end. It’s quite the cliché but I must say that it’s always surprising when you wake up on a Friday morning and it feels like Monday was just yesterday. I guess that’s what working in a fast paced start-up environment does to your time perception

Now that we have the debacle with German giants O2 behind us (water under the bridge guys, we don’t like to hold grudges) I thought I would take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about our new Tell-a-Friend program.

For those of you that don’t know what the Tell-a-Friend program is, allow me to briefly “tell” the story. Tell-a-Friend is located on our website on the “Invites” tab under “My Rebtel”. On this page you can import email addresses from friends, family or business acquaintances and send them personalized invites to join you and the rest of the cool people in the Rebtel community.  As of right now, you can import contacts from your Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, Windows Live (formerly known as Hotmail) and LinkedIn accounts. We constantly look to add new import sources as all of us have our contacts stored in a variety of locations.

Those were the technicalities; let’s proceed to the fun bit

For the first 20 friends that you send an invitation to that decides to sign up because they think Rebtel sounds like a pretty sweet service (partially because you are using it), your account will be credited with 10 minutes of free calling (remember that they have to make a call to someone for you to get those minutes).

So what now, does it end here you might think? It certainly doesn’t!

With the new Tell-a-Friend, you are not only able to earn minutes, you can also earn dollars (yes, dollars). For the first 20 friends of yours that signs up through your invite and makes a payment to their Rebtel accounts you will receive $10. Yes, you heard right, $10.

So what’s the conclusion from all this? Well, if you haven’t contributed to a better world with a good deed today, this is the perfect opportunity. Give a friend the opportunity of calling someone they like for only a couple of cents instead of a couple of dollars. To get going with Tell-a-Friend you are just one click away.

From me and the rest of the Rebtel Team, have a great weekend!

Ps. Your friends get 20 minutes of free calls by signing up through your Tell-a-friend invitation, now that is a good deed..

Rebtel Wins Battle Against O2

Dear friends,

Victory!

Rebtel is officially back in town and we’re planning on staying for a loooong time without any unexpected interruptions Everyone at Rebtel has been working frantically on the O2 case the last couple of weeks and we are unbelievably happy to announce that as of this afternoon, we are no longer blocked by O2 in Germany.

First off, we want to thank all of our users for the massive support and help during the past couple of weeks. Without your personal support, blogging, Tweets, Diggs, Facebook status messages, emails to O2’s CEO and phone calls to their support staff we could never have made our voice loud enough for O2 to hear us. With the Rebtel community being able to come to terms with O2 on this matter we have proved that together we are strong. We held our ground and the persistency surely paid off.

We will continue to update our blog with the latest news so to make sure to add our feed to your RSS reader or simply bookmark http://blog.rebtel.com. To see the press release in full, please click here.

Once again, thank you friends and all the very best!

/Alex and the rest of the fabulous Rebtel Team

PS. Now we’re going back to basics and to our daily routine which consists of pushing the calling prices as low as they can possibly get. All of you guys as Rebtel friends can help us out with this by telling your friends about us and as icing on the cake, we’ll give you up to $200! It’s the truth. Click here for more info.