Tag: pat phelan

startups

Twitterfone launches

Twitterfone

Twitterfone launched last night to a spectacular response. Mike Arrington gave it a glowing report on TechCrunch and the feedback has been very positive.

What does Twitterfone do? Not much! It does one thing and it does it well. It allows you to dial a local number, leave a short message, the message is then transcribed and posted to your Twitter account along with a link to the audio file in case the transcription doesn’t quite come out.

The best use case for this is in your car when you shouldn’t can’t browse!

I have no idea how well it works if you are outside your own country but Pat being the king of roaming, I imagine he is all over that.

Just how good is it? Well I just left a message saying “@patphelan looks like everyone is looking for a twitterfone invite” and got the following Tweet posted:

ask Pat Phelan looks like everyone is lookig for a twitterfone invoice

It obviously had issues with my enunciation (although listening back, the quality of the line left a lot to be desired).

A couple of things Pat will need to add to improve it (and I assume Pat has already thought of these):

  • Support for Twitter commands – @, and d particularly and
  • OpenID support – it still amazes me that people build their own proprietary login systems when they can leverage OpenID and facilitate single sign-on for their users

Well done to Pat and the rest of the team for getting this up. I look forward to watching its evolution.

Telecoms

Cubic Telecom forms strategic alliance with Global Roaming Inc

I see Pat Phelan’s Cubic Telecom has announced a “strategic alliance” with Global Roaming Inc who trade under the CelTrek brand.

The press release on Pat’s blog is short on details and pat is travelling at the minute so I’m not sure what exactly the alliance delivers to each company apart from what they say in the release:

The partnership will allow both companies to offer extended geographic coverage and data roaming on their existing products.

From further reading of the release, it seems to get CelTrek a foothold in the European market and Cubic Telecom appears to get some cost reductions out of the deal.

There is no mention of any monies changing hands.

Well done Pat on landing this alliance – looking forward to seeing where this takes you.

IT@Cork, Technology

Cubic Telecom wins an it@cork Leader Award

A big congrats to Pat Phelan and the Cubic lads on Cubic Telecom’s winning the it@cork Leaders Award in the Emerging Company category.

Pat was up against some very stiff competition and I am glad I wasn’t involved in the judging ‘cos I know Tom Keane of Nitrosell and Paul and Frank from YouGetItBack as well as Pat and any of them would have been a great choice for the award.

The Awards night was a fantastic success and I think I can safely say that this is set to become an annual event.

Other winners on the night include Treemetrics, TCH, and Abtran.

John Collins did a really professional job as MC – his look back over the last 10 years brought waves of nostalgia.

If I had to criticise anything about the night it would be that the talks dragged a bit in the middle of the evening but this was due to the fact that it was a double celebration, the Awards and the 10th anniversary of it@cork’s inception. As such this is unlikely to be an issue in the next nine Awards nights!

[Disclosure – I am on the Steering Committee of it@cork and Pat is a client of mine]

mobile

MaxRoam Launch today

MaxRoam was launched today by Pat Phelan’s Cubic Telecom.

MaxRoam initially offers a sim card for your mobile phone which you use when roaming. The sim card costs €29.99. You can add multiple numbers to the sim card so that, if you live in Ireland, for instance but visit Spain frequently, you can have Irish and Spanish numbers mapped to the phone. You give the Irish number to your Irish contacts and the Spanish number to your Spanish contacts and everyone is making low cost calls.

This is great. €29.99 is about 1/10th of my last Vodafone bill when I was abroad!

Where it is even more impressive though is when you are in Spain (again, for example), receiving calls, the cost is far lower than receiving calls using your standard mobile operator.

Consider the Spanish MaxRoam charges
MAXroam pricing for Spain

Now compare them to the Vodafone costs (I choose Vodafone as they are my mobile operator)
Vodafone pricing for Spain

If I send or receive texts in Spain on Vodafone’s network they charge me 49c (on any other Spanish network they charge me 65c). With MaxRoam receiving texts in Spain is free and sending texts on any network is 37c.

Call charges with MaxRoam are similarly cheaper. Receiving a call is 25c (per minute, I assume), making a call is 33c p/m. Vodafone charge 29c p/m to receive call, 59c p/m to call within the EU €1.19 p/m for calls to the Americas and an eye-watering €3.19 per minute for calls to the rest of the world.

I choose Spain for this example ‘cos I have family living in Spain and go there regularly but you will get similar numbers for other countries.

What I am not clear on is when you are in another country, are you locked to a particular local mobile provider or will any work.

I know Pat well and while he’s a lovely guy, I know he’s not doing this out of the goodness of his heart. If Pat can charge these low rates and still make a profit, how much are the mobile operators coining in?

Whoop their asses Pat!

UPDATE – In Pat’s post about the launch he says:

What we will do is put YOU first, here’s my mobile +353872049121, if we leave YOU down in any way call me up and give me a piece of your mind.

And renowned Technology writer David Pogue gives MaxRoam a great write-up in the New York Times.

Now that’s impressive.