Rebtel Awarded For Best Utility App at Mobilgalan 2010 (Video) November 12th, 2010  

Rebtel Winners at Mobilgalan 2010

Anjani (Head of Procurement) & Hjalmar (Co-founder) with our award (Photo: Linus Höök)

Last night was a great night for Rebtel.

Over at Kista Science Tower, a historical ground known for housing some of best and brightest Swedish technology companies, we were on the receiving end of the award for Best Utility App for Android and iPhone at the acclaimed Mobilgalan 2010. Other notable winners were our fellow Swedes and disruptors, Spotify, who won an award for best app in the entertainment category (congrats guys).

The jury, which we would like to thank, consisted of the following people:

  • Linus Brohult – Executive Editor, Mobil
  • Östen Mäkitalo – Professor, Royal Institute of Technology
  • Jonas Ryberg – Technology Editor, Metro
  • Tomas Bennich – Kista Mobile Showcase and founder of the Swedish Mobile Association
  • Kristina Höök – Professor, Stockholm University and Head of Research, Mobile Life
  • Marianne Treschow, former Director-general, Post- och Telestyrelsen
  • Johan Larsson, Editor, Mobil Business

So, what is Mobilgalan you might ask?

Well, for us Swedes, it’s known as the most prestigious award in the entire mobile industry. It’s organized by the mobile magazine Mobil and its purpose, according to Mobil themselves, is “to reward good efforts, award, enlighten individuals and companies within the Swedish mobile industry.”

This award is a big deal for us for a number of reasons. The main one is that even though we are a fairly large company these days with millions of people using our service, very few of those people are actually based in Sweden. For that reason, we are thrilled about the recognition this awards gives us in our cold and gloomy native of Sweden. Our home-turf.

If you want to see how it all went down last night when Anjani and Hjalmar picked up the award, check out the embedded video below. Unfortunately. it’s in Swedish, but as we think our unmistakeable happiness transcends all language barriers, we figured we should post in anyway.

Last, but certainly not least, here’s a picture of Andreas, our CEO, posing with the award this morning.

Andreas Happy About The Award

What does this picture teach us? Well, keep developing great apps and keep winning awards and you’ll end up with a boss with a permanent smile like the one above.

Thank you!

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: , , , , , , ,

Welcome Newcomers! November 26th, 2008  

New Rebtel Countries

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.


By: alexander drewniak Tags: , , , , ,