Truphone Puts Carriers on Notice, Expands Reach to Hundreds of Millions
January 6th, 2009 Oliver StarrCategories | Downloads | Features | Getting Things Done | LifeHacks | Mobile
If your income is tied to that of the carriers you might want to take an aspirin before you sit down to read this. On the other hand, if you’re a person that likes cheap calls and applications that make your life easier and less expensive this post may just put you in a better mood. In either case I have some big news so by all means, please read on.
Truphone, the UK based company that has been something of a quiet revolutionary in the alternative telephony space has just become a whole lot less quiet. I just got off a call with Truphone CEO Geraldine Wilson and she shared the news that Truphone has just integrated Skype services into their platform.
In a nutshell what this means is that the universe of people that you could call for free has just jumped from the hundreds of thousands to potentially hundreds of millions! Additionally, Truphone now allows you to do more than just talk. Instant messaging capability has been added and not just for Skype contacts but for MSN, Yahoo and GoogleTalk contacts as well.
So far, this new Truphone functionality is being launched on the iPhone and iPod Touch and will be available starting next week via the iPhone App Store. When I queried Geraldine on what other phones we might expect to see this functionality in the future she said that the App Store had changed their world in terms of speed and ease of distribution and that they had no plans to offer future developments to platforms that were not supported by an App Store or application marketplace similar to that created by Apple.
This means you can probably expect to see a new Truphone update for the Android platform and for Blackberry at some point in the not too distant future but that unless Nokia wises up and moves from Download, which is a weak effort from what should be the dominant player in this arena, to an application market that really makes it easy to install third party applications, they won’t be getting any future love from Truphone.
When it comes to usage, the application will support free calling to all your Skype and Truphone and Gtalk contacts within range of a wi-fi access point, free or very cheap calling to contacts that are on mobile or landlands and free or very cheap calling to all your contacts when connected only via the cellular notwork (though not of course for the iPod Touch which only connects via wi-fi anyway).
In addition the new application supports presence information which means you never need place a call prior to knowing if your contact is available and that now, while on the go, you can also provide this same free/busy information as you do while at your computer, preventing unwanted interruptions or making welcome calls at such time as you want to be reachable.
This is some really ground-shaking news and it is particularly bad for the carriers which in the case of the iPod Touch have been completely dis-intermediated from their market. Even for iPhone users this is huge. In fact, for a lot of people this means that they’ll almost never have to route a call through the carrier network again if they live anywhere that wi-fi is reasonably available. In fact, when you think about it, this may be the biggest telephony news of 2009 and it’s only January 5th. For the carriers the only bright side to this is that it’s so early they’ll have a long time to nurse the hangover this news is sure to engender. And based upon some future developments that Truphone CEO Geraldine Wilson only teased at during our talk, that hangover may last a long, long time.
