The British phone company easyMobile is back, 18 months after it had to shut down. But this time the brand name doesn't stand for a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). The Greek serial entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou, also founder of the airline easyJet and other successful low cost product ventures, has changed the business model entirely and doesn't comply with his former announcement about the future of easyMobile.

Exactly one year ago Stelios told me that he wanted to resuscitate the company as MVNO with free phone calls, sponsored by advertising. A similar business was already in the making under the name of Blyk, a UK based start-up by the former president of Nokia Corporation, Pekka Ala-Pietilä. It launched some months later but it seems that Blyk hasn't conviced Stelios, because the new easyMobile is nothing more than a new face for the Swedish VoIP company Rebtel. The press release says:

Rebtel, the people's global communications company, today announced a brand licensing agreement with easyGroup that will allow Rebtel to increase its presence in the UK and reach new markets for its mobile VoIP services.

easyGroup is the business of easyJet founder and serial entrepreneur Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou.

Under the agreement, Rebtel-powered services for making low cost international phone calls from any mobile phone, over any UK network, will be sold and marketed on easyGroup's http://www.easyMobile.com web site.

Rebtel's CEO Hjalmar Windbladh sounds very enthusiastic. "Sir Stelios and easyGroup are our kind of partners", he says. "They want to make a difference in people's lives. They offer services for the many, not the few. They take on the big boys in the market and treasure relentless innovation. And most importantly they're open and honest. Those are all values that Rebtel was built on."

Hopefully his cooperation lasts longer than the former easyMobile. Stelios is a genius in lending his brand name, but he also tends to end franchising very fast. The first easyMobile was planned as pan European MVNO in 12 countries. The Danish operator TDC licensed the brand from Stelios' easyGroup but things didn't turn out so well. TDC got bought and changed their business strategy which made Stelios retract the brandname. In just 48 hours the German branch had to change its name into callmobile. „You always have to be cautious that the franchisees don't damage your established brand name“, Stelios said in our interview.

Hjalmar be careful!

Labels: Blyk, easyMobile, free phone calls, MVNO, Rebtel, VoIP

                                      

Truphone finally makes it public: According to fellow VoIP blogger Alec Saunders and the UK site Techworld, Truphone is set to announce Truphone Anywhere, a service that lets you acccess the Truphone network from any mobile, whether on WiFi or not.

You know what? I know this service since February and better didn't tell to not ruin Truphone's surprise. Research Director James Body showed it off secretly to me at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. That's what I wrote in a later blog post on February 29, 2008:

They always have much more advanced Truphone versions installed than normal users. The last lab version I saw in Barcelona was quite promising and solved a problem I was always nagging about.

I am don't think that the new Truphone Anywhere feature with its beautiful Skype like "A"-logo is a direct reaction to my nagging blog post "To make money from mobile VoIP, companies have to accept certain realities" from February, 1st. But it attacks the problem that "WiFi isn't everywhere and callback costs double", which was always my strongest point against many mobile VoIP business ideas like Truphone.

To solve it, I recommended a network of international callthrough numbers which users can dial for local prices to channel their mobile phone calls into the VoIP system of companies like Truphone, Gizmo5 or WiFiMobile. It seems that Truphone finally took my advice, after Wifimobile had already announced a similar solution and Gizmo5 always cooperated with Sipbroker for local callthrough.

Techworld now writes that Truphone could join the bandwagon because they have bought the travel SIM card provider SIM4Travel. But I guess that Jajah or Tpad could also have provided with the necessary infrastructure.

Truphone Anywhere dials a gateway on a local number, which then connects through to the destination number, saving money if it is an international call. Unlike some other services, this is transparent, with the call set-up handled automatically after the user dials the remote number. It is enabled partly by a recent Truphone acquisition, SIM4Travel, which provides cheap international calling through gateways in Europe.

Let's see if it's as cool as the Israeli mobile VoIP software miracle from Mobilemax which automatically connects the cheapest way. I am also wondering what came first: 1.) the acquisition of SIM4Travel, 2.) the last round of financing, 3.) Truphone Anywhere? The official Truphone version is 1, 2, 3. The financining allegedly followed one week after the acquisition on April 17, 2008. But I am pretty sure that it went 3, 2, 1.

UPDATE:
I have now installed the new Truphone software 4.0. Anywhere doesn't work yet in Germany.

UPDATE 2:
After contact with Truphone's tech support and a complete erase and reinstall it works now.

Labels: Gizmo5, Jajah, Mobile VoIP, SIM4Travel, Sipbroker, Tpad, Truphone, VoIP, Wifimobile

                                      

To all my friends who received annoying marketing email messages from a miserable Silicon Valley internet startup called Boxbe: I beg your pardon.

After I signed up to Boxbe, more than 500 of my email contacts received annoying invitations, saying "I'm using Boxbe to screen my email and I've added you to my approved Guest List. Can you take a minute to make sure your contacts can reach me?". Many people have received this message already six times. Now I get emails back from buddies saying "could you please stop spamming me and my girlfriend? Boxbe sucks!".

All this happens only because I once hit the "invite friends" button at Boxbe. But have hit it only once and it was only by chance.

There is no reason for Boxbe to flood my friends with unsolicitated email messages. Most of them are Germans and don't even understand what Boxbe is. To them a Boxbe invitation is the same as an email from a Viagra pharmacy. My 73 years old aunt Gerda forwards all Boxbe messages to me and prays that I can take away this plague from her. My mum does the same. I then click the link at "If you would prefer not to receive any further invitations from Boxbe members, click here" and hope that helps.

What upsets me most: I was already aware that something like this could happen. The Canadian blogger Alec Saunders had published it under the title "Boxbe’s spam. A fatal mistake for them and me". Therefore I only "approved" my friends' email addresses at Boxbe and never "invited". Unfortunately one time I mixed it up and that's how it all started.

I have contacted now the Boxbe tech support (support@boxbe.com) as well as Boxbe Product Manager Randy Stewart (randy@boxbe-inc.com) to stop these annoying invitations. Boxbe, you can't sell yourself as an anti spam solution by being a spammer yourself!

If it wasn't for these stupid marketing messages, Boxbe would be one of the greatest solutions to keep up with the information overflow. It could keep my inbox clean from emails which are worse than Viagra spam: unsolicitated press releases and stupid advertsising messages. A doorkeeper for emails.

My problem is, that German law requires me to post a working email address in the contact section of my website. Another annoying fact is that PR agencies seem to sell my email address which I use for journalistic work. Therefore I get tons of messages to these addresses. Most of them are filtered as spam by an automatic solution. Only once a week I have to check for false positives, but the anti spam filter nearly never goes wrong.

But then there are marketing messages like the one I got from Dow Chemicals two days ago. Something is wrong with some crop, they said, and only pesticides from Dow can help, supposedly. WTF? Where did Dow get my email address from and why do they send this message? I am no peasant and as a journalist I am only interested in technology stuff, mostly when it's related to VoIP or mobile communications.

Boxbe would have put this message from Dow under a quarantine. Since it didn't come from an authorized contact, it would have had to wait at Boxbe before it could enter my real inbox. Messages from authorized contacts would go straight to my email inbox and are shown on my cell phone. All other messages have to wait in the outer office. Once a day Boxbe sends a summary of all these waiting messages and you can kill or authorize them with one click. Users of Yahoo Mail, Gmail or Outlook can have it even more comfortable.

"With Boxbe, your inbox is no longer a free-for-all", is the company's claim and I like this idea very much. By using the tool wisely and combining Boxbe with other technologies, your inbox would not only be free of spam about Viagra or penis enhancement. But you could also have a great fence against unrelated messages which slip through the spam filter but are unwanted anyway.

If only it wasn't for Boxbe's stupid bulk invitations!

I hope they will stop now. I have the feeling that Boxbe only sends them out when I make a change in my settings. Hopefully that's true! In this case I could give it another try.

In an other blog I found this alleviating comment from Boxbe:

randy@boxbe.com said...

Just a point of clarification here. We're not planning on sending invitations every week to users. Rather, if multiple Boxbe users invite the same person, we'll only send a maximum of two to that person in a given week.

Ideally, if multiple Boxbe users want to invite someone, we need to figure out how to send that person one invite from all those people combined.

We're still pretty new at the invite game, but hopefully we can work all the kinks out sooner rather than later.

Cheers,
Randy Stewart
Boxbe Product Manager

Hope that helps.

Labels: Anti Spam, Boxbe, Boxbe Spam, Spam, Web_2.0

                                      

Yesterday was a very good day for my small blog. I got quoted in The Industry Standard, VentureBeat, TMCnet and the Voxeo blog with my findings about Hipsip and the free bridge from Skype to phone.

That feels good.

Labels: Hipsip, Media, Skype, VoIP, Voxeo