Fring 3.0: interview with one of the co-founders

A few months ago I reviewed Fring in this blog, calling it a “pure mobile voip service“.

Fring is a mobile VoIP service (in beta) by which you can make and receive calls through your mobile phone by using the 3G data network.

In conclusion, I think Fring is a great step forward for the FMC world. Fring is a pure VoIP service and, unlike other competitors, they provide you with a presence-based client capable of enabling you to call even your Skype or Gtalk friends. I’m going to try a Fring – GTalk call right now… I’ll post an update to this post with my comments on the call quality etc. pretty soon.

During VON Spring last week I finally met Boaz Zilberman , one of the co-founders of Fring. I can say our chat has been really interesting, first of all because Boaz is an expert of the IP world, having worked for Radvision for a couple of years before joining Fring, secondly because Boaz has well explained to me how Fring works and why it’s different from competitors. The other co-founder instead, Alex Nerst, is the former co-founder of ICQ, the historic IM service.UPDATE: The other two co-founders are Avi Shechter, CEO (this is the guy that was the former CEO of ICQ, the historic IM service) and Alex Nerst, CTO with background in VoIP from his previous start-up. (thanks Boaz for pointing this out).

First of all, he explained to me the real value of Fring in terms of technology. Unlike other players in the mobile VoIP market, Fring is the only one which really uses the data connection of your mobile phone to make phone calls, wether it is Wifi or 3G. As already explained in my previous post, they use a proprietary protocol from the mobile phone to the Fring’s servers to handle voice packets. This way most part of the job is performed by Fring’s servers, allowing final users to save bandwidth and battery power on their device. Skype already demonstrated that users don’t care if they are using a proprietary or a standard protocol, they just want a service that simply works. And Fring do.

He also explained to me that their approach let them do what Skype has not done yet, that is letting users to make and receive phone calls from a Nokia mobile device using the data connection.

Supporting SIP, Boaz continued, was an important step that, in my opinion, makes Fring the most complete multi-protocol IM VOIP client for mobile phones. They’ve just published a video explaining how to use Fring to make SIP calls.

It was funny that during our chat I’ve received an IM message from a Gtalk user to my Fring client on my Nokia N80i. Boaz told me that in terms of usage, VoIP is secondary to IM, that is the most used feature of Fring so far.

What about business? How do they make money?
They have different models in mind. First of all, they are willing to license their service to service providers and VoIP operators which would like to provide a mobile VoIP experience to their users. Vonage, I’d say, would be the ideal one in this perspective. In addition, they are also thinking of a model based on advertising, but I understood it’s too early for this.

In conclusion, I really recommend to take a careful look at this service. It’s really different from competitors and I do believe that this fact will let them make interesting moves and bring real innovation to this market, that with players like Nimbuzz, Talkster and Gizmo is becoming always more crowded.

I encourage Boaz to add comments to this post if he wants to better clarify some points or add something that I forgot.

Technorati Tags: avi shechter, boaz zilberman, fring, gizmo, luca filigheddu, nimbuzz, talkster, VON

This post was written by

Luca Filigheddu – who has written 2313 posts on Tech Genial.

Twimbow CEO, blogger, , geek, early adopter, italian, san francisco, twitter addict, piano player, taekwondo, love gadgets, proud dad and husband.

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