First hand comparation from a Tringme Beta Tester and Ribbit Developer

My last blog post "Tringme does the Ribbit" received an interesting comment from a person who seems to know the topic very well. The anonymous commentator calls himself "both a tringme beta tester and a ribbit developer" and reveals that Ribbit applications will cost their clients an arm and a leg, compared to normal VoIP prices. Skype and Jajah will seem cheap compared to Ribbit. Although I hardly ever use them because I get my VoIP calls much cheaper from other providers.

I hope this comment wasn't just a plot from Tringme to take on Ribbit. To me it sounds reasonable. At the end both companies will suffer when Adobe makes Pacifica a standard VoIP feature for the Flash Player.

Read the entire comment from the insider!

Tringme does the Ribbit

There are Copycats wherever you look. Smith on VoIP today criticizes that "Rebtel Borrows Iotum’s Idea; Now Offers Facebook Conferencing App", while Rebtel themselves feel copied by Jajah Direct:

We want to tip our hat to our friends at Jajah for the introduction of Jajah Direct. Those folks have done a brilliant job at making something that Rebtel has been doing from the start sound brand new and innovative.

What I’m talking about is free or low-cost international calls without the need for Internet access. Or said another way: Rebtel service as it’s been from day No.1.

And while we’ve always thought our service was innovative, it’s super nice when you get validation from a competitor that you really did break new ground and that all the other ways of making a VoIP calls are “old school.”

When I received today the following announcement from Tringme, I couldn't but wonder: Don't I know this story from somewhere else? Then I realized that it was Buzzword Bingo time again. While Tringme recently got great publicity for their Flash based click to call widgets, some days later Ribbit took it all away by also presenting Flash apps and additionally alleging to be Silicon Valley's first Phone Company.

At the core of Ribbit's technology is the Ribbit SmartSwitch™, a sophisticated multi-protocol soft-switch that bridges the worlds of traditional telephony with next generation networks and protocols.

Ribbit is an open platform for telephony innovation. Unlike any other phone company, we are giving our developers unprecedented access to our technology, through the Ribbit API and allowing them to innovate at will. Our business is built more like a software company than a phone company.

Now Tringme announces the "Tringswitch" which sounds quite similar to me. Both products promise to fulfil every VoIP necessity. But nobody has seen them yet in public. Bingo!



TringSwitch Launch and Demo at HeadStart.in

Dear TringMe User,

First of all, we wish you all a very happy 2008!!

Life at TringMe continues to march at a fast pace and we wanted to share some recent developments with you.

Very soon, we will officially launch TringMe's platform server - TringSwitch. TringSwitch is a highly reliable and real-time platform optimized for web-based telephony applications. It's the core back-end of TringMe widgets and is now available for others to build interesting and innovative applications on it. TringSwitch can be integrated with any telephony back-end including SIP server, PSTN gateways, SMS gateways etc. TringSwitch can be used within an enterprise infrastructure setup or can be used for consumer facing web-based applications.

TringMe's Mobile VoIP client can be easily configured without downloading anything. We can remotely configure your mobile to use TringMe by merely sending you a special SMS. This is a novel way for a user to start using the mobile device without having to spend any time configuring the device settings for using TringMe. Alternately, you can also download TringMe’s Symbian client (which will be available soon) from our website to enable Mobile VoIP on your Mobile and leverage additional functionality (e.g. sending an SMS over IP) from it.

With Mobile VoIP support, using your mobile, you can connect to your friends not just on landlines and cellular device, but also on IMs like Gtalk. Essentially, all termination points that are accessible by TringMe widgets from a PC are available via Mobile VoIP as well. This has been one of the key requests from many users of TringMe and hence we are extremely delighted to provide the same.

We also added speech recognition (ASR) capability in TringSwitch thereby making it convenient for TringMe users to initiate voice-based actions. New innovative applications like voice-enabled yellow page, voice enabled vertical searches, interactive games etc can be developed quickly with TringSwitch with almost no effort or coding.

We are very happy to announce that TringMe was selected as one of the companies which should demonstrate it's capabilities at HeadStart (http://www.headstart.in) which is going to be held from Jan 18th to Jan 20th in IISc, Bangalore, India. If you are attending HeadStart, please stop by for our demo. We will demonstrate TringSwitch including TringMe's Mobile VoIP capabilities. We will also show how to develop a rapid prototype application using TringSwitch and Speech Recognition in merely a few minutes without any coding efforts.

We look forward to seeing you at Headstart and thanks again for your continued support and suggestions. Write to us: bizdev@tringme.com


Feel free to let us know if you need any assistance.

Regards,
TringMe Support
http://www.tringme.com/

Free calls VoIP widgets make me get funny phone calls

Since my last post "Call me for free with Tringme!" I get funny calls from Senegal and other far away countries. They go through Tringme, but also my click to call widgets from Voxalot and Sitòfono. Somebody must have spread the word that I give support on certain VoIP services and devices. No wonder that people call me, since it's for free.

I am OK with such calls, but please understand that I can only answer during working hours in my time zone. The rest of the calls goes to the voice mail box. The yesterday's caller didn't even understand that he was talking to an answering machine. He thought that I was on the phone with him but refusing to answer, so he got a little upset. Also I had serious problems to understand his Englisch and the e-mail address he left.

I think for such purposes it's still the best option to contact me over the contact form on my website. The last caller who came through caught me on my cell phone in a department store when I couldn't help him at all.

Call me for free with Tringme!

Much has been said about startups like Ribbit, Tringme or Flashphone which use the Flash browser plugin for click to call widgets. Aswath Rao even declares 2008 the Year of Flash based VoIP Clients. I can only say that you don't have to wait till next year to call me for free using Flash. I love my Tringme call widget:

These calls are entirely free to you, because the caller speaks into the Flash widget on my website using a headset or the laptop's built in phone and speaker. On Linux the sound is a little bit weird. The automatic voice, which says "please wait while we connect your call" before every connection, sounds like a 45 rpm record played on 33. The phone call itself sounds like Mickey Mouse, but still the the words are understandable. On Windows everything works just perfect.

Also to me these calls are entirely free. Other than my widgets from Sitòfono and Voxalot where I have to pay to call the person who wants to contact me.

I achieve this by using FWD as SIP provider to power the Tringme widget. The Tringme account website says "Connect my phone and voicemail widget to Phone number or extension". Unfortunately it accepts only numbers and no SIP addresses in this input mask, but as a workaround I have simply put my FWD number there. In the "TringPhone SIP Settings" part of the account configuration I left my FWD login data. Which means that every Tringme call is in fact a free FWD on net call. You can probably do the same with Gizmo Project's SIP account data and phone numbers, as well as with many other VoIP providers.

Also there is another widget for people who don't want to talk to me, but just leave a voicemail.

Only seconds later I get a call and a voice says "You have a Tringme" before it plays the message. The Tringme widgets are much better than Gizmocall which also allows free calls from a website.

You could call me for free by simply typing http://www.gizmocall.com/mgoebel in your browser's address bar. This website also uses Flash, but additionally you have to install a plugin for Windows or Mac. For ten months yet Gizmo owes us a Linux plugin. Although the company's CEO, Michael Robertson, even has his own Linux distribution, Linspire.

But why bother? The Flash browser plugin gets more and more versatile and works on all platforms. It's a new way to disrupt the telco industry, circumventing the PSTN and offering a new option for free phone calls that so many people appreciate.

So, if you want, please give me a Tringme call!

And, before you ask: No, I couldn't get Truphone's Facebook application running, which should basically do the same like Tringme, only that it uses Java. After one week of tinkering I gave up. But congratulations for winning the "Red Herring 100 Global" Award.