I am on the phone talking to Jonny Bentwood 2.0, one of the good guys, from Edelman consumer subsidiary JCPR. We’re discussing his client Rebtel, which allows people to use their mobiles for international calls with no downloads, from any phone, no muss no fuss. 10 calls per month for as long as you want for free, no contract. RedMonk will be trialing this. If anyone else is interested please let me know – and i will get you an account provisioned. On that note I will also be able to give clients local calls access to us from their cellphones so please just holler…. Seems like no real downside at this point, other than having one more phone to call into. And once a new number is provisioned – you keep using that one. In other words I will just have a Cote Austin line that is local rate for me to call. Sweet. While I am on the subject of Mr Bentwood in his new incarnation at one of the PR BigCos, its pretty obvious he is already giving good advice about blogging strategies to his clients- here is the Rebtel blog (the blogroll is the clever bit so far…).
One thing we’re both agreed on is the long heralded convergence is upon us. IT industry analysts had better become convergence analysts quickly, because that space is going insane right now. Five years from now will anyone be paying for phone calls? The current model is certainly living on borrowed time. Why is Datamonitor smart? Because they bougt Ovum, which has the strongest analyst presence in European telecoms. Likesay- that’s where the market is heading.
will says:
March 12, 2007 at 3:55 pm
delighted to see someone else singing the same tune james. your thoughts are really interesting.
one of the odd things about being first in this new category is that the 1990’s mobile revolutionaries have become fat, bloated and establishment, with millions of customers to extort (sorry, support) and call centres to fill.
even though they were once the natural change-makers, their appeitite for change has now gone.
that means that, as with the airline industry, someone from the outside has got to come along and disrupt.
perhaps more interesting however is the role of the handset manufacturers, who are at once in league with the operators, and against them. they will have an interesting role to play in the next 12 months. watch this space…
jgovernor says:
March 12, 2007 at 4:05 pm
i dont want to say too much about fat and bloated – which doesnt take long these days. But suffice to say RedMonk is one of the change-making companies, rather than an incumbent. So what industry are you approaching from? Nokia has certainly begun to play out the new operator killer strategy. its one reason i can’t work out for the life of me why Apple signed the Cingular deal.
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March 14, 2007 at 9:08 am
[…] questions for them which he’ll hopefully get an answer for. James, in the meantime, has gotten us all local access numbers for each other. Based on Raven’s recommendation, I’ll also […]
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Mixed bag | aqualung’s small pieces says:
May 18, 2015 at 11:56 am
[…] Talking to James last night, using Rebtel – he’d just set me up a local (Australian) number to ring him on, avoiding international call costs. He has a bit to say about it here. […]