Here are 4 questions James Tagg Ceo Truphone

Current status (roadmap, progress, number of users): Truphone has recently received £12.5m ($24.3m) of Series A investment from pan-European VCs and media groups. This is the biggest investment of its kind in a European tech-sector company in 2006, possibly longer. It is therefore well-funded for growth and development. This growth in development includes supporting more Wi-Fi-enabled handsets, and growth into additional geographies (meaning, for example, mobile number ranges in countries besides the UK and the USA). The goal is to create a worldwide Mobile Internet Network Operator providing a critical mass of customers with a free/low-cost alternative to conventional cellular network service providers.Your know-how:Truphone introduced internet telephony (‘VoIP’) to mass market mobile phones, enabling users to make free calls from their handsets to other Truphone users and low internet-rate calls to any telephone worldwide. In late 2006 this was extended to free phone calls to a range of VoIP services.

Here are 4 questions James Tagg Ceo Truphone

Can you tell us more about your service ?
Truphone is mobile internet telephony for everyone. In essence, the Truphone wizard – the software that is downloaded to the phone – helps users to configure the SIP settings on their handset, which is an otherwise difficult process for anyone who isn’t reasonably technically-minded. It also makes finding and using WiFi hotspots easier, and provides – until the end of March 2007 – free calls to landlines in more than 40 countries.

What is your business model ?
The business model relies on termination costs for both inbound and outbound calls, of which Truphone gets a share just like any other operator. Some people have questioned what happens should voice call charges fall towards zero, or if everyone was making Truphone-to-Truphone calls which are free. The answer is that we will continue to introduce wholly new internet-enabled services to customers’ handsets, which won’t always be free.

What are the projects, additional features you’re preparing ?
We’re looking at interoperability with IM applications, so it will be possible to talk to a Truphone user from those applications, and vice versa. This requires ‘presence’ information, of course. And in order to make Truphone as good an experience as possible for as many people as possible, we’re continuing to work on simplifying the Wizard process as far as we can. Beyond that, we’re not ready to say.

What are the current users’ feedback, your learnings on the service’s usage ?
The feedback is overwhelmingly positive although Truphone is still a ‘beta’ service. It has a few ‘known issues’ and our many customers are, through their experiences, helping us to iron them out. It is a tenet of the company that we are very open about the service: we invite comments at www.mobilevoipforum.org, where you can see all comments for yourself.