In an announcement today, UK-based Truphonelaunches free calling from mobile Truphone customers in the US to landlines everywhere (well, 40 countries worldwide actually). This program is an extension of their UK launch promotion and will be in effect until the end of June. So if you really want give a great mobile VOIP application a whirl, now’s your chance. US customers have always been able to talk to other Truphone users for free but now they can call regular landlines too.

You can download Truphone for your Nokia handset here:
http://www.truphone.com/downloads/downloads.tru

Watch a YouTube video of this press release here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK9wuSFoSqQ

And finally, read the whole press release:

March 27th 2007 – Orlando, FL & London, UK - Owners of Wi-Fi-equipped Nokia smartphones will be able to make free international calls from the USA to landlines in 40 countries throughout April, May and June, mobile internet telephony pioneer Truphone announced today. The announcement extends and enlarges Truphone’s current price promotion [ending on March 31st], during which customers have been able to make free mobile Voice over IP (VoIP) calls across the USA and Canada.

“We’re delighted to be making it so attractive for people to try internet telephony on their mobile handset, instead of being tied to their computer,” said James Tagg, Truphone’s CEO. “The convenience of a normal, mass market cellular handset and free international calls is an unbeatable combination for the consumer.”
Countries to which any on-net Truphone user worldwide may now make free calls to landlines include China (landlines and mobiles), Mexico (Guadalajara, Mexico City and Monterrey), Russia (Moscow and St. Petersburg) and most European Union countries.

Tariffs to some paid-for numbers may have changed from the previous promotional period. Truphone’s full tariff document is available at www.truphone.com.

Under the terms of the new promotion, free Truphone calls can be made to the following countries (applies to Truphone calls to landlines only, unless otherwise stated): Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil (Rio de Janeiro & Sao Paulo only), Canada, Chile, China (Landline and Mobile), Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Guam, Hong Kong (Landline & Mobile), Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Korea (South), Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico (Guadalajara, Mexico City & Monterrey only), Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama City, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Russia (Moscow Central & St Petersburg only), Singapore (Landline & Mobile), Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, US Virgin Islands and USA (landline & mobile).

About the Truphone service
Truphone enables Wi-Fi equipped mobile phones to make 100% VoIP calls at either zero or very low cost to the caller, by using the SIP standard and the Internet to route network traffic, rather than traditional mobile phone networks. Truphone-to-Truphone and Truphone-to-SIP number calls are always free, with Truphone calls to other numbers charged at cheaper rates than those charged by mobile operators and often at lower cost than even a conventional fixed line.
There is no monthly subscription, no inbound charges and billing is via pre-pay. Sign-up and top up are done via the web site. Customers get Truphone by downloading a small piece of free software over the air to their phone. When a Truphone-equipped handset is not in Wi-Fi range it reverts to being a normal mobile phone, with calls routed over GSM as usual.

We just had our first winter storm blow through. The result was twenty-seven hours of no power. After the first two hours my son proclaimed the most boring day of his life (no computer, no Nintendo). In the midst of trying almost every home VOIP solution under the sun, I’ve still hung onto my landline. Good thing too. Even my cell phone battery died. Of course, my PhoneGnome didn’t mind. Without power or Internet connection, landline calls worked just fine thanks.

Initially, I thought that the online support systems for VOIP softphones Skype and Gizmo Project were pretty decent. Using them to answer burning questions is another matter. 

Online Help belongs with the application. When I click Help > Online Help, please DON’T send me to the Knowledge Base or FAQs. Please DON’T open up another browser window and make me wait while the generic Help home page appears. Please DON’T make me use the Search feature. High level user guides or getting started tutorials are great, but make sure they’ve got some meat in them.

A Knowledge Base gives you little gulps of info with no breadcrumb trail to follow and no sense of context. To really aid and educate users, build Help right into the interface. Take the time to explain fields and buttons before I use them. To provide more information, use a fly-out Help pane (part of the interface that’s only visible when needed) and pull the content from an online server.

I want online Help that is specific to what I’m looking at on the screen. I want to browse Help by drilling down to the level of detail I need without losing my place in the story.

The End.

Alec Saunders has a post today on keeping kids safe on the Internet. A new product called IMSafer allows parents to monitor unsafe or suspicious online messaging while still protecting kids’ privacy. Bravo! See http://www.imsafer.com/.

The subject of kid safety online brings me to Skype and their talk-to-a-stranger-anytime feature called Skype Me. Skype Me essentially disables your privacy settings so that anyone on Skype can call you or invite you to chat. I’ve only turned this feature on once to see what would happen. Yikes. No thanks. Frankly,  I think it’s creepy. And after I disabled it, I went looking for the parental control command that would allow me to block this feature from being used. There doesn’t seem to be one.

Now I believe that parents have the responsiblity to supervise their children’s Internet time. It’s not the job of a corporation. However, Skype should consider building in kid safe features. For parents like me, it will make the difference if or where their product is installed in the home. 

With so many companies assembling at the starting line for the race to mobile VOIP world domination, I wonder if we’re seeing a hurry-up-and-wait sort of thing. On the VOIP Service Blog read about mobile VOIP in a nutshell.

Here’s an idea from Michael at GroovyGreen.com who commented on my Three Tries to Cancel Vonage post. When he called to cancel his Vonage service, he had this great yarn prepared:

“This is what you do: Call their HELP line, go to the cancellation option and then wait. (Luckily, I waited about 5 minutes.) Next, as soon as the person gets on the line say, “Hello, My name is Michael and I would like to cancel my account because I am moving to another country.” This will immediately cause them to lose most of their script and go to Page 2. The kind woman on the other line then asked me if the move was permanent. I told her that I would be overseas for the next 10 years. She countered by saying that Vonage could be used anywhere, it was one of the advantages, etc. I agreed that the thought had crossed my mind, but unfortunately I was moving to a place where Internet service was not allowed. She asked if she might know the location of this country. I told her Ethiopia. She asked if there were any towns nearby that might have Internet access, I told her no, because I was moving to a monastery and it was 100 miles away from the nearest town. Very remote. She became quiet and then asked if there was anyone living in the U.S. that could use the account while I was gone. As this point, I was like, ‘Jeesh…’, but I went on, “No, there’s nobody here in the U.S. I could transfer this too. That’s part of why I’m leaving the country. My family has passed away, my dog just died, and I just don’t value material possessions as much as I used to.’

She got started on canceling my account….”

As usual, Carolyn Schuk over at Voxilla writes a great post summarizing Skype’s appeal to business users. The bottom line is that today, Skype works well for a “small workgroup to increase productivity”, but it just doesn’t bring it for all around business-class communications.

While I can appreciate Tom Keating’s wholehearted enthusiasm for the rash of gadget deals that abound today, Black Friday and all, I do pause ever so slightly when I remember that isn’t this time supposed to be well, Thanksgiving, as in the Giving of Thanks?

I’m hardly the first person to point out that giving thanks with the right hand hand whilst brandishing our credit cards with the left seems a little crazy. In Canada, many of us watch American news stations showing the 5 am line-ups, door crashing mayhem, and fist fighting moms. But we’re no better. The traditional Boxing Day Sale, the day after the biggest “giving” day of the year, is when Canadians lose their heads.

Who started this anyway? Okay, enough sour grapes.

I recently mentioned Jangl in Battle of the Js. On first look, I wasn’t overly enthused–the home page promise didn’t mesh with the user interface/support once logged in. But since then I’ve had chance to talk with the folks at Jangl to learn more about their service. They agree the user experience is something they need to improve, and are working hard to get there as we speak.

Jangl’s Tim Johnson was able to walked me through all this, so now I get it. However, he knows you can’t personally explain the concept and use to everyone. Improving the overall package to make the service clear and easy to use is part of Jangl’s planned enhancements over the next month and a half, starting with the announcement last week of a new Jangl widget for Tagged, a social networking site. Today, Jangl announced a new TypePad widget which will give TypePad bloggers and their readers anonymous phone numbers for talking, texting and exchanging voicemail on their mobile phones.

Here’s what I learned about Jangl:

It is all about connecting two people without sharing phone numbers. The two people can be bloggers, social networking junkies, or they can be “off Net” contacts.  Why would you want to keep your phone number private? Well, let’s say you’re selling something on Ebay or Craigslist you don’t want to share a personal phone number. Or you have a personal profile on a social networking site and you want to connect with your fans without sharing a personal number. Or how about you are using an online dating site like Match.com and want to keep your contact number private.

There are two ways people can get an exclusive number for you. As a Jangl user, you can give out your Jangl ID or you can post a Jangl widget on a website or email. If you give your Jangl ID out at a party, for example, the person goes to Jangl.com and follows the instructions to generate a number for you. If someone clicks your Jangl widget online, the widget generates the number. Either way, people can call you on a regular landline or cell phone. You answer the call on whichever phone is attached to your Jangl account. It could be a mobile phone or an office phone, for example. You can choose to answer based on the caller’s introduction, or you can send the call to your existing voicemail system.

Because Jangl relies on the use a regular phone to make the actual calls, not a computer platform, you can receive calls from fellow bloggers visiting your Typepad site while out and about on your mobile phone. YOU don’t have to be sitting at your computer. And once the other party has generated a number for you AND specified their mobile as the phone they’ll be calling from, then they can call you from anywhere as well. That’s a pretty cool way to take your online profile with you.

The only required online part of the process is generating the phone number. Once that’s done, the computer is completely out of the picture. You can maintain a list of Jangl contacts online in your account, but that’s up to you.

Who pays? To get a Jangl ID and create an online widget of your own is free, but because the calls you make and receive are on regular mobile phone or landline networks, you pay the appropriate fees to the service provider.

Hope this helps!

Yes, I just bought a new headset. So when I read about Jajah’s new No Headset movement, I thought, ‘forget it Leanne, you can’t win’. They even have a web site:  http://www.noheadset.com. You can check out flicks of people trashing their headsets. (I’m not going to slapshot my shiny new $100 headset thanks.)

However, my take on this campaign can be summarized by their new tag line "If You Liked Skype, You’ll Love JAJAH". It’s a way to put themselves in the same league as Skype but also to differentiate in a way that says we do what Skype does and we do it better. Unlike Skype, JAJAH lets you make internet calls using your regular desktop phone, which is great. But, don’t some people choose headsets because they want to be "handsfree"? If that’s the case, blowing up your headset would be BAD. Whatever.