It’s That Time Again! December 19th, 2008  

It’s that time again folks – holiday season is officially here (well, more or less). All of us that work here at Rebtel like to think that Christmas is a special time of the year for a lot of our users. See, a majority of you use our service to keep in touch with friends and family when you’re away during the year doing all kinds of stuff. Maybe you’re away to attend school abroad, maybe you’re backpacking in Europe for a couple of months to widen your horizon or you might be busy working out of the country and are forced to be away from the people that matter the most to you. Christmas is a holiday when a lot of you get the opportunity to come home, step through the door and finally reunite with your loved ones after spending a long time apart.

To celebrate this we are launching our Holiday Offer. What’s special about it is that it’s primarily targeted to our existing users. Some of you have contacted us through email, Facebook and Twitter and asked us why we haven’t been giving away any sweet deals to the people that have been with us the longest through thick and thin. Well, we sure haven’t forgotten about you and this is our little present that will hopefully make you feel warm inside.

When you make a deposit of $50 we give you a little holiday bonus, 20% more talk time to be exact. If you’re not happy with that and want more, you have the option of making a $100 or $150 deposit to receive 30% or 40% more talk time than you would otherwise. Have a look below to get the idea. Doesn’t look to shabby, does it?

Lastly, we would like to thank all of you that have supported and believed in us throughout 2008. Next year will be even better, you can count on that.

From all of us at Rebtel, we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year!

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: , , , , ,

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: , , , , , ,

Has Rebtel made your life easier? September 26th, 2008  

Badge_get_help

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!

By: alexander drewniak Tags: , ,

Be a Nice Friend and Rebtel Citizen September 12th, 2008  

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..

By: alexander drewniak Tags: , , , ,

Rebtel Wins Battle Against O2 September 2nd, 2008  

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.

By: alexander drewniak Tags: , , , ,

Rebtel Featured In Wall Street Journal August 21st, 2008  

The Wall Street Journal is without a doubt considered as one of the most influential news publications we have in the world today. To get a mention in “The Journal” is something not a lot of companies can boast about but as of yesterday, Rebtel is among the select few.

To check out the article, click here.

By: alexander drewniak Tags: , , ,

Party Is On – Rebtel Officially Best In Class July 3rd, 2008  

There has been little to no guidance for people looking for the cheapest rates in the jungle of Mobile VoIP providers. A lot of companies make claims saying they have the cheapest rates but most of the times they fail to back it up. Well, here at Rebtel we actually try our best to always practice what we preach and now we have something to officially show for it.

Rebtel Best In Class

An independent third-party research company based in London called Technology Appraisals has done a pretty, pretty extensive comparative study on 15 Mobile VoIP Providers and their prices. You might have figured out where I’m going with this and you are completely right. We won!

Out of all companies featured in the study, Jajah and Truphone to name two, Rebtel was crowned best in class and overall price leader. This is obviously great for all you guys being our users but it’s just as great for us as a company. There are a lot of factors that make up Rebtel in terms of our own values and benefits we want give our users but there are two in particular that we never have (and never will) compromise on: reliable quality of service and reliably low rates. We like to think we have the best quality (hopefully you agree with us) and now it’s finally official that we do have the lowest rates. Among others, the cool people over at TMCNet covered the story and you can find it here.

So what are the learnings here? Well, we think you should give yourself a nice pat on the back, have a cold drink in the sun with someone you really like and feel extra smart because you use Rebtel :)

Ps. Don’t forget to friend us up on Plurk and Twitter to have a chat and get the latest updates from us

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

Public Service Announcement – Still Free Calls With Rebtel June 16th, 2008  

Hola compadres!

During the past week there has been a lot of buzz going around in the Voip blogosphere regarding our friends over at Mobivox and Truphone. They have both been written and talked about quite frequently but unfortunately not in the most flattering of ways. Until very recently, Rebtel, Mobivox and Truphone all had something in common. We all offered free internationall calls. As sad as it is, all that stopped when Mobivox and Truphone both announced they have decided to discontinue their free calling service.

All this drama has been the reason for these two companies being on a lot of people’s lips. When Mobivox made this announcement on their forum it caused an outrage among their users. Although, one has to give Mobivox some credit for making the announcement using a way more personal message vehicle than a press release and that must have at least somewhat relieved a few customers irritation. Good job guys!

We are extremely happy here at Rebtel that there are other likeminded companies like us out there that truly try to be on the end users side. We really do. Luckily, there is an alternative for all these people that still want to make free international calls, even though it’s not with Mobivox or Truphone. Our very own Rebtel equivalent service, Smart Call, is still alive and kicking and not going anywhere!

Our mission here at Rebtel is to create resonance in the telecom space, to disrupt and put an end to the “daylight robbery” that takes place every time we make an international call with our mobile phone to our sister or friend living abroad. This world of ours is becoming increasingly borderless and keeping in touch with your loved ones is more imperative than ever. So, if you can think of anyone out there that just moved to the other side of the world to start a new job or to study, call them and give them a few encouraging words and tell them you miss them.

Oh yeah, don’t forget to tell them we said hi :)

By: alexander drewniak Tags: , , , ,

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