The industry isn’t going anywhere near sanctioning a cell phone number directory.
So what are these VoIP startups doing promoting caller ID services?
It’s a bit of a riddle, promoting a caller ID service for cell phones that historically have never had a “pure” caller ID function the way wired phones offer. But coming up with some features that mimic what people know from wired phones is, ironically, just what a group of startups is doing.
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Todd: TalkPlus was
the byproduct of a
personal need. |
They’re probably not going to rattle the cages of wireless service providers quite as much as VoIP companies that advertise cheap international calling rates for cell phones, although for some, that is a component of their business. Instead, they might prompt carriers to investigate how they could work together, with, of course, agreeable revenue share models. At least, the startups aren’t ruling that out as they pursue their direct-to-consumer models.
TalkPlus, for one, is in trial mode with carriers, with the most interest coming from Europe. “The U.S. carriers seem more apprehensive, like they’re circling a piece of meat they’re not sure they want to eat,” says John Todd, chief technology officer at TalkPlus. He invented what he describes as a primitive form of the TalkPlus solution a few years ago out of a personal need to manage his own cell phone calls when he was in charge of a large global network and had people calling at every hour of the day and night.
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT
The caller ID solutions from a smattering of startups each work a bit differently, although they generally involve the assignment of a new phone number that mimics a real cell phone number without actually revealing it.
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Wener: Vumber is
gaining interest from
the medical profession,
online daters and even
domestic violence victims. |
For about $5 a month, Vumber allows cell phone owners to get an additional number in real time by going to its Website. Customers can pick pretty much any area code they want in the United States. When someone calls that number, the phone will ring and the customer hears a prompt, then presses 1 to accept the call. When dialing out, the user dials the Vumber number, or virtual number, then the number he or she wants to call. The recipient of the call sees the Vumber number. With the Vumber number on speed dial, the end-user doesn’t have to change his or her behavior, says Vumber founder Cliff Wener.
Features include the ability to exclude certain calls during pre-set times. One of the biggest beta user groups of Vumber is the medical profession. Other users are online daters; one group that isn’t talked about so widely is victims of domestic abuse who can use a Vumber number and not have their location revealed.
Another company that shares similarities to Vumber is Jangl. CEO Michael Cerda and Chief Technology Officer Ben Dean got together in 2005 after Dean listed an ad on Craigslist for a partner to help him establish a company surrounding a technology he was working on. Dean, who was based on the East Coast, ended up staying in Cerda’s West Coast pool house off and on for about six months while they incubated the company.
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Cerda: Different customer value proposition than voice SMS companies are putting out. |
Their first big deal in 2006 was with Match.com, allowing online daters to talk to one another via a mobile or landline phone without giving up their true identity. They added an SMS component in 2007, allowing people to text one another without showing their actual cell phone number. “We’ve seen traffic go through the roof,” Cerda says of the SMS deployment, which he suspects could be an even bigger opportunity than voice in terms of volumes.
Late last year, they launched JanglMe for Bebo, complementing a year-long streak of voice-oriented deployments with popular social networks, such as Phonebook for Facebook and Jangl for Friendster.
Jangl’s revenue stream comes from social networking sites selling its service as a premium feature, but the company’s plans call for the next stream to come from advertising. “We’re not trying to be that company that allows you to call from Seattle to India for pennies,” Cerda says. “That’s a completely different mindset or DNA. We’ve always come out as a lifestyle service, meaning something that impacts lifestyle as opposed to saving money.” That said, Jangl does have a strategic partnership with JaJah, which offers low-priced international phone calling.
SAFEGUARDS INCLUDED
TalkPlus says it does everything Vumber does but with additional features. It costs $9.99 a month. TalkPlus doesn’t work seamlessly with every cell phone – Verizon Wireless’ BREW is the most closed – but major platforms are supported, including BlackBerry, Treo, Windows CE, Java, Symbian and the iPhone. It’s an 
application that sits on the phone, so a download is required. But the founders did it on purpose to avoid changing user behavior. “If people have to spend more than 10 seconds … they won’t do it,” Todd says.
If you want to set up certain calls to make them go through your London caller ID, for example, you can do that. The voice mail feature allows users to listen to messages out of order based on who left the messages, or customers can listen to messages as they’re being left and decide to intercept them, much like you would do with a home answering machine. Soon to come is a feature that allows users to pick ambient or background noise, such as a train station, for their calls. As a safeguard, one thing the service doesn’t offer is the ability to use TalkPlus numbers to call banks or conduct other financial-related functions.
Similar to the other services, TalkPlus offers mirror numbers. Doctors and lawyers, for example, can call a client or patient without letting them know their true cell phone number, thereby avoiding calls to their cell 
phones at the wee hours of the morning. It also offers a feature that makes international calls far cheaper by routing calls through local numbers and the TalkPlus servers.
THE “GOOGLE ME” PHENOM
The idea that people might start saying “Jangl me,” similar to the way they say “Google it,” is not that different from some voice SMS companies, such as Bubble Motion, which encourages people to “Bubble Me” by sending and receiving recorded voice messages, or as in the case of Kirusa, sending a “Talky.
But Cerda says voice SMS companies typically are trying to change user behavior. “We’re not trying to change people’s behavior,” he says. “What happens to date is people text with people they know, but what Jangl is doing is bringing the opportunity to text even if we don’t know each other so well, and that’s bridging the Web world and the phone world.”
There is a VoIP component to Jangl, but “to say we’re a VoIP company is to say BMW is a tire company,” Cerda says. About a year ago, Jangl realized it was becoming a media company, bridging the worlds of 
phone and Internet, and started staffing up in that direction. Now, rather than being a pure-play VoIP company, about 25% of the people who work at Jangl are media types.
So far, the VoIP/media companies are not working direct with carriers, largely because they say they can’t sit idle while waiting for a carrier to examine their solutions and then go through a lengthy acceptance process. But they’re not ruling out the possibility of carrier deals. “We like the carriers and we have a value proposition,” Cerda says. “We’re sticky for them, drive up minutes and text messaging and we’re complementary to their revenue models. We help produce text messages and phone calls where they maybe wouldn’t have taken place.”
Todd says TalkPlus also is carrier-agnostic and its service doesn’t require the explicit cooperation of carriers, but working together could make their lives easier, paving the way for billing, for example, direct on customers’ wireless phone bills.
The new crop of VoIP/caller ID companies could throw a curveball at some other services designed to come as close to caller ID services as there is. Cequint, for example, offers its City ID service through Alltel Wireless, whereby customers see a caller’s city and state. If someone uses a VoIP number with a different area code, City ID reads the new registered area code as the home calling area.
But it doesn’t really change anything regarding City ID, other than someone could select a number from a different state and give the appearance they live elsewhere, which can be done anyway by adding a line. “Whether you have City ID or not, your brain will be doing lookup on the area code anyway,” says Cequint President Scott Weller, adding that the VoIP services just underscore how much consumers want to keep their mobile numbers private.