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: , , , , , , ,

Crunchies 2008 Are Coming Up! November 26th, 2008  

Here in Stockholm there’s been a blizzard for the last few days. Nights are colder, days are longer and meaner. Thick flings of snow are poring down like there would be no tomorrow and Stockholm is gloomier than ever. The sweet, warm summer breeze of June, July and August has never felt more distant than right now. If you would like to bring a little bit of warmth and sunshine into our lives we would be very grateful if you voted for Rebtel in the Mobile category for this years Crunchies Awards.

The 2008 Crunchies is the second annual competition and award ceremony put together to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The Crunchies is co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, and TechCrunch. Best of all, the Internet community is invited to choose who wins.

If you like our service and what we’re trying to do for telephony, please don’t hesitate casting a vote our way by simply clicking the little button above. In return we promise you better prices, greater innovations, and a cooler service. Not like you wont get all of that if you decide not to vote – but still :)
Thanks in advance guys, we appreciate the support!

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