By James Wanless
President & COO of Talkster

I continue to be surprised by the number of companies that emerge offering “free” calls. Most of these, including one that I saw today — “FreeBuzzer” — initiate calls from a web browser. Basically, enter your number and the number that you want to call and they initiate 2 outbound calls and connect them (sound like JaJah?). The math doesn’t work and never will. So how can it be free? The cost here involves 2 outbound calls. If you are calling USA to USA then at 2 x 1 cent a minute for call termination, it’s quite cheap. I have had numerous conversations with others in the industry about where the pain point is for the consumer telephony market. The general consensus is 5 cents a minute. Up to 5 cents a minute nobody cares. Over that, people increasingly do care. What this means is that nobody cares about services like this unless they offer free calls to mobile phone where the cost typically is 15 or more cents a minute. In this scenario this “free” calling method makes no economic sense, and advertising revenues can NEVER cover a cost of 15 cents a minute. The only way to make this free or close to free is to eliminate the termination costs.

For an example of this, take a look at a service Talkster recently partnered on http://freeringer.biz where you can initiate a call from your PC (eliminate one termination charge) and have your friend connect to you by calling a number for you that is in his local calling area (eliminate the second termination charge). Now that’s an ad supported model that works and which makes sense for the consumer (and Talkster has connected millions of calls in this fashion to prove my point).

So, while the “free” calls offers may keep on coming out of the woodwork, they are usually loss leaders to pay VoIP services (just as FreeBuzzer turned out to be). As my grandfather said, “If it looks too good to be true, it usually is too good to be true” Translation: It’s not true!

It’s that time of year again where if you (like me and many others I know) have family spread around the globe you figure out how you can possibly get everyone together in one place at one time or else you spend the whole holiday season driving and flying from place to place to see them all. For the record, when I have grandchildren, I expect everyone to travel to me!

Joking aside, it’s tough to get one’s entire family in one place to catch-up on all that happens while we are apart. It doesn’t matter which time of the year it is, the family news gets passed from one person to another in a series of one-on-one conversations as the phone is passed around from person to person. This year will be different though. The Talkster family is very proud to play a part in connecting families this holiday season with our “Talkster Free World Dialing” service we launched this past October. With Talkster’s Free World Dialing friends and families can set up group calls with up to five other people from around the world.

It’s really easy to use and best of all the calls are free! All you do is go to the Talkster site from your PC or mobile phone, enter the names and numbers of the people that you want in the group call and each of them is assigned a local number to call to join the conversation.

When we built Talkster’s Free World Dialing we knew it had to be easy to use, even for people who don’t have a computer. This means when it’s time to make our family group conference call, I don’t have to rely on my old Uncle to remember what time the family call is going to start. All I do is dial the local number, record a short message telling my family to all to get on the line so we can chat and Talkster does the rest. Each of my family members gets a call from Talkster where they hear my short recorded message. They hang up the phone and dial in to their local Talkster number. Once they have connected, we are joined together. We all listen to a 10-second targeted audio ad that fully subsidizes the cost of our call, and then we can talk as long as we want.

It doesn’t matter if all of my family members don’t all call into our group call at exactly the same moment. They can join at any time the call is in progress. We can talk for as long as we like and people can come and go as they please.

This year there’s less traveling needed yet my family and yours can still share their news and good wishes together. I know nothing is as nice as being there, sitting around the table together with loved ones; but Talkster is a good alternative to keep families connected when you can’t all be in the same place at the same time.

Happy Holidays to you and yours from all of us in the Talkster family.