DRW'S TMBLR

My Boss

Jenima Kiss is a lady that has a tech blog over at The Guardian. It’s pretty good actually.

Anyhow, I just got a Google Alert (triggered by the phrase “Rebtel”) and when I checked it out it turned out to be a pretty interesting interview with my boss from work, Hjalmar Winbladh.

In the interview Hjalmar mentions that Rebtels’ biggest competitor and challenge alike is the average persons inertia. Over the years, the big mobile carriers around the world have done a good job with having us grow accustomed to their ludicrous rates on international calls.

Actually, now that I think of it, I have been brought up and taught that calling abroad costs a fortune and if you do it you might have to file for personal bankruptcy.

Slightly exaggerated?

Yes, but I think I got the point across.

The substitute awareness affect among customers of the telecommunications giants around the world is definitely there. Although, I think people (often wrongly) automatically assume that new technology must come at a high switching cost. Maybe not necessarily monetary, but the learning curve is perceived as too steep to climb. This might be the case, sure, but if the reward is much greater than the effort, it’s well worth it.

Personally, I think it’s just a matter of time before people truly realize that their carrier is ripping them off in broad daylight and having a good laugh on their way to the bank. In due time, when people experience that epiphany, I will be standing there with open arms welcoming them all to the world smartness: the world of Rebtel.

You can find the interview here.

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Jygy.com - Mobile Social Networking

A cool little detail they got going here, in the spirit of social media considering it’s a Web 2.0 conference, are “badge tags”. Badge tags are basically a set of small stickers that look like this. The thought behind them is to put a few on your badge and tag it (just like in the world of Web 2.0) so that people you meet on the Expo get more information about you and chances of striking up a conversation about something relevant increases. Anyhow, a pretty clever little something that caught my attention.

I walked around the hall where the Expo was held and talked to some exhibiters. One amongst many were the guys behind Jygy. Jygy is, according to these guys anyway, the next step in mobile social networking. From what I could grasp, it’s a social network for mobile devices with functionality like private chat rooms, mobile polls and mass messaging. They have a mobile device optimized website but a majority of the services are initiated through SMS-messages.

They have been online for about a month now and are obviously still in Beta. I asked him how many users they have so far but I got the usual “we haven’t looked at those numbers yet”-response. I’m not sure whether or not a service like this will take off since all the major social networks like Facebook already have sustained value with their number of users and are also working towards optimizing their respective service for mobile devices. Furthermore, as I learned today, experts predict that in the future there won’t be anything called “mobile web”, there will be “one web” which in turn is thematically consistent across all devices.

Just before I got out of there I asked if the guy could sign-me up and he said sure. The only problem was that they only have support for US carriers. Slight lack of global approach there I must say..

In the next post I will talk about the first talk I went to, Mobile Ajax and the Future of the Web with Vodafones senior technology strategist.

And lastly, if you want to see some of the pictures I took today you can subscribe to my San Francisco dedicated Flickr Feed. Just click it and bookmark it if you’re on a Mac and don’t use an RSS Reader.

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