1 Enter phone number
Enter your mobile number and your friend’s number in China or Myanmar

2 Get local number
We’ll give you a local number in your home country that will connect you to your friend in China / Myanmar

3 Save number and call
Dial the local phone number to speak with your friend in China or Myanmar

Join here to get started or log in if you’re already a Rebtel customer.

You’ll be charged your phone operator’s usual rate for a local call. The connection to China / Myanmar will be free.

If you want to support people in Myanmar and China please visit important support organizations like:

http://www.supportunicef.org
http://www.redcross.org
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org

Please note (Updated 2008-05-19)

Fair-use policy allows you 2 hours to China. We are happy that so many are calling to Myanmar but our current capacity cannot hold more calls, so a lot of people cannot get through. We therefore have to temporarily limit the free minutes to 10 minutes when you phone. We hope to be able to increase our capacity again before the 22nd of May. We apologize the limited calling but are happy we can help people to connect.  We will continue to work on increasing the minutes and quality. China and Myanmar will have the above mentioned free minutes until the 22nd of May 2008. 

A new day and a new post from San Francisco. This time the topic will be of the presentations from the actual conference that was very interesting in general but particularly from a Rebtel perspective.

The session was entitled Mobile Ajax and the Future Web and was held by Daniel Appelquist. Daniel is senior technology strategist with the Vodafone Group based in London, UK, where he primarily works on Web and Internet projects and industry activities.

The first part of the talk (which I found most interesting) was a lot about the two different (and today separate) entities we refer to as “The Web” and “The Mobile Web” and how a convergence between the two is taking place.
In a (not too distant) future there will only be one Web when referring to mobile devices as well as regular laptops and desktops. Thematical Consistency, ensuring that content across all devices is provided coherently and consistently, will be ubiquitous and the standard to aim for. Thanks to devices like the iPhone (which naturally was mentioned as a groundbreaking device in this field), the task of obtaining Thematical Consistency becomes significantly easier.

Daniel also mentioned that today, mobile devices are slowly overtaking desktops and laptop based web usage (so cool). Mobile browsing is in other words seriously on the rise and with that device from Apple that came out last year securing a fourth place overall on the Internet browsing market share list with its 0.15%, we can get a hint of what’s to come. In as little as five years, the majority of the total worldwide web usage is predicted to be mobile (!).

A cool little detail during the talk, which felt very reassuring for us coming from someone like Daniel, was that he mentioned Rebtel (see the picture above) as one of the companies that truly are in the forefront in mobile technology and web. Thank you Daniel, you are a rock star!

As you might know, some of us from the Rebtel crew are over in sunny San Francisco, California to attend the Web 2.0 Expo. The Expo, which ended on Friday, was really awesome and featured some very heavy names from this web world of ours. A selection of some of the people we were fortunate enough to see include Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media), Jonathan Schwartz (CEO at Sun Microsystems), and Marc Andreesen (co-author of the first web browser Mosaic and currently with Ning).

We will cover some of the most interesting talks from a Rebtel perspective in a later post. To make sure you don’t miss it, you can go ahead and subscribe to our blogs RSS Feed.

Anyhow, on our flight from Chicago to San Francisco we noticed that Verizon offers a solution for in-flight calls. That’s great you might say, considering you are not (yet) allowed to use your mobile phone on board an aircraft to call your business acquaintance or your friend waiting for you on the ground to pick up you up. Phones on planes are pretty much ubiquitous and not new thing in any shape or form so nothing really remarkable there. Although, what did catch our attention, was the price they charged. If you’re a sensitive person, you might want to hold on to something. To call with Verizon on a United Airlines flight, you have to pay the ridiculous amount of $10 per minute + taxes and a setup fee (see the image above). God knows how much that setup fee is but the point is, for us that are accustomed to making international calls for just a few cents per minute, this was a pretty shocking revelation. Trust me.

So what are the learnings here? Well, you will be able to call use your mobile phone on flights sooner rather than later so maybe Rebtel should get into the market of offering ultra-cheap international calls while in the air? You know what, maybe be will! What we do know for certain is that we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible and we still have a long way to go on our road towards making sure as many people as possible have the opportunity to make international calls for the cost of a local call.

Best wishes from San Francisco,

Alex

Did you notice the cute seed peeking out of the Rebtel logo this morning? Today is Earth Day and the seedling is our way of commemorating the event. Find out more about Earth Day and ways you can get involved at http://www.earthday.net/.

“Serial entrepreneur Hjalmar Winbladh founded the firm with Jonas Lindroth with their own money and later scored $20m in venture funding from Index and Benchmark. Winbladh tells us why it’s a market ripe for disruption - and that the only obstacle is our own inertia…”

[Hjalmar Winbladh interviewed on Guardian digital content blog, 17 April 2008.]

We are not SPAMers or purveyors of fraudulent materials or activities that are restricted by law to those over 18, such as gambling or lotteries.

Nevertheless, if you take the time to wade through the nearly 200 collective pages of legal mumbo jumbo recently filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel and CTIA – The Wireless Association, you might actually come away thinking we are. Or could be.

In fact, the only thing we do at Rebtel is give consumers an alternative way to make an international call from their mobile phone, for which we charge them a few pennies per minute instead of mobile operators’ ridiculous rip-off rates.

As you might guess, the carriers are not wild about our service – even though it’s super simple and very low cost to implement. Just ask our friends at Skype, Jajah and Jaxter which are now blatantly copying Rebtel’s invention.

That, however, is an entirely separate kettle of fish.

The issue at hand before the FCC is very straightforward. And we totally agree with AT&T, which wrote in its filing that it is important for the FCC to be clear as to what this proceeding is about, and more importantly, what it is not about.

AT&T wrote in its filing: “This proceeding is not about the ability of wireless customers to exchange [text] messages with other wireless customers. What is at issue is whether wireless carriers can be forced to enter into joint marketing arrangements with content providers through the activation of short code campaigns.”

But for some reason they got it backward. The issue concerning Rebtel is all about the ability of wireless customers to exchange text messages with other wireless customers, and has absolutely nothing to do with marketing using short code campaigns.

As I’ve discussed here in the past, short codes, among other uses are how text messages (SMS) get sent from a company’s web site to an individual’s phone in the U.S.

What’s happening is the carriers’ customers want to send themselves a text message from the Rebtel web site and they want to receive text messages that their friends, family and work colleagues send to them from the Rebtel web site.

But Verizon and Alltel won’t approve a Rebtel short code campaign that would allow those messages through. And while AT&T has approved Rebtel’s campaign, it transmits the messages as flash SMS so they disappear if you don’t immediately save them when they arrive.

All these games because the carriers don’t like what’s in the messages: local phone numbers where you live that connect you to friends abroad.

Verizon wrote in its filing that it does not block text messages, “except those addressed to its subscribers that are captured by its spam filters, or that are affirmatively selected for blocking by its subscribers.”

But there is no mass mailing of text messages going out from Rebtel that might be trapped by a SPAM filter. Instead every single messages is 1:1 sending initiated by the Verizon or AT&T or Alltel or whatever customer to either themselves or from a friend.

What the carriers are doing is really no different than if Verizon started listening into customers’ voice calls and disconnecting the calls if someone talks about a better deal over at AT&T.

So, let’s cut through the baloney. This is about business.

We created Rebtel with a very simple vision: Take the phony out of telephony.

Our mission: Create a genuinely good, honest, trustworthy global communications service that saves people money.

And we set out in 2006 to build a company on just three values: Always take the customers’ side, whatever you do must be clear and simple, and have no fear – do the right thing.

That approach has paid off. Rebtel blew past 1 million regular customers months ago and we’re now tripling in size every three months in terms of new customers, revenue and minutes carried.

In contrast, I think Verizon’s approach of trapping customers into multi-year contracts and then milking them for every penny possible is beautifully captured in its request for the FCC to dismiss the petition filed by Public Knowledge, Free Press and other leading consumer advocacy groups.

Verizon argues that the complaints in the petition refer to “isolated instances” that don’t warrant government involvement. “If consumers want to join a short code campaign that Verizon Wireless has not enabled, they may switch to a provider willing to enable that campaign.”

Okay, Verizon – which providers do you suggest? And, by the way, will you wave the penalty fee on my contract when I do?

Yes! It looks like at least one of the major mobile operators has started to come around to Rebtel’s way of thinking. T-Mobile’s new pricing plan, Business 1-Plan, allows business customers to call the US and Europe with their inclusive minutes. (International calls are generally excluded from such packages: instead you have to ‘activate’ the service and then pay ridiculous rates for your calls.)

We’re glad to see one of the major operators saying what we’ve been saying for the past two years - international calls shouldn’t cost the earth. Of course, as this is for business customers only it’s still a long way from the kind of open communication model we’d like to see, but it’s a start.

And in the meantime? We’re still here to help you get the most out of your inclusive minutes - and with Rebtel, you can save on calls to anywhere in the world. Not just Europe and the US. Now that’s the business.

We’re off to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco later this month. According to their website, the expo will:

“…take the pulse of the Web ecosystem and look to its future, training a spotlight across the Web 2.0 universe to illuminate how the Internet Revolution is being created and delivered. Web 2.0 Expo is for the builders of the next generation web: designers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, business strategists, and venture capitalists, people who have experiences to share and a passion for learning–the hot new thing, lessons from failures, innovations and inspirations, and the practical applications of all of the above.”

We’ll be doing some microblogging from the event, so be sure to add us to your Twitter friends if you haven’t already. Or maybe we’ll even see you there - let us know!

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