Cool enough to get us named as her Cool Site of the Day

FreeRinger, a free calling service built on the Talkster platform, was honored this week by none other than “America’s Digital Goddess,” Kim Komando herself!

Kim named FreeRinger her Cool Site of the Day. Thanks Kim, for the plug, and for sending all your readers and listeners our way to save money on their long distance and international calls.

Beyond what Kim detailed in her short review, Talkster has two other services that people looking to save a buck on international calls should know about. While FreeRinger is designed for people to place calls through their Web browser, these other Talkster built services can be used from any kind of phone.

Talkster’s Free World Dialing: The FreeRinger service is based on Talkster’s FreeWorldDialing service, which essentially turns your long distance and international phone calls into local calls. The neat thing about Free World Dialing is that you can use it from any type of phone to call any other phone (Landline, Mobile, VoIP phone, etc.). Click here to get started using Talkster’s Free World Dialing today: www.Talkster.com.

talki: The talki mobile app (currently available in Europe and Canada) delivers super cheap text and picture messaging and international calling anywhere in the world. With a built in credit and payment system, talki is not limited to the countries supported by Talkster’s Free World Dialing, giving you a highly affordable way to call or message with friends and family anywhere in the world. Visit www.talki.me to start using talki today.

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!