Nearly every VOIP related startup has their own click-to-call widget, Jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr, and even GrandCentral. These widgets let you easily and sometimes anonymously set up a call with friends over the web. They’re very useful and come packed with features like voicemail and texting. However, each of these services connects phones to phones, which still eats away at your mobile minutes while you’re talking to that business contact or MySpace hottie.
TringMe offers a bit more flexibility. Callers can ditch their phone and call directly through their Flash widget to your mobile phone, landline, and GTalk (Yahoo and Skype coming soon). All they need is a microphone and one click. Although they’re still in private beta, you can try the demo widget to the right for an idea of the experience.
Similar to the other services, your phone number is kept private and the calls are free (now’s the time for that overseas call). You can also set the widget to just receive voicemails, which are emailed to you, saved on your standard mailbox, or recorded and played back in GTalk. There is one major drawback, though. Since there is no virtual phone number involved, callers have to be at a computer and can’t call you while they’re on the go.
Naturally such an easy and anonymous calling service is susceptible to abuse, and I don’t see any countermeasures in place to keep out prank calls and telemarketers. The other services have verified phone numbers and white/black lists to keep abuse to a minimum. I expect TringMe will have to incorporate similar controls to make people more comfortable with using the widget.
Open to telemarketers…..more spam calls….that sucks.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
they really need to do something about their logo — it is probably one of the ugliest i’ve seen yet and so amateur like. Looks like a 5 year old designed it.
Horrible name, horrible logo, horrible home page and a commodity product.
YawNNNNN!
**smack***smack***
Logo aside, it looks like a good service and I will try to get an invite.
This is a crowded space and not sure whats the business strategy and revenue model of this company. Look at jaxtr, initialy started as call me widget, later changed their business strategy to international calling. Also, not sure whats the success of these voip widgets companies with social networking like facebook,myspace.. If u look at the number of users using these widgets in facebook, thats way below the mark compared to other apps.
Cheers,
Omfut
I guess they need to do something about the spim/spam so as to make sure that this service isn’t abused.
Having said that, I got an invite and tried the service. It works well with gtalk and phone. I did get a mail on for offline voicemail ..
Some of you, including Nick have commented about the potential to abuse this service by telemarketers, pranksters etc. We fully comprehend the problem and are working on it. We are working in several ways to tackle this issue. We already have throttling in place to slow down users who maybe trying to abuse the service. We are working on a couple of mechanisms that should reduce eliminate the voice spam (spim). Unfortunately, we cannot share those details quite yet but will keep our blog updated, stay tuned - http://www.tringme.com/blog.
Omfut, you have raised a good question about the general revenue model for our service. We think that availability of the flash-based telephony platform and some of the core applications built on this platform will open up means to generate revenue. We still need to hash out some of the precise details, but wanted to get some early feedback for the service to see how and where we can improve it before launching it commercially.
We understand that TringMe’s look and feel (website, logo, UI) hasn’t catered to everyone’s taste and that’s a feedback we definitely intend to work upon
We sincerely appreciate all kinds of feedback which will help us strengthen the overall offering ..
Yusuf
I haven’t found any information about the team behind the page as well nothing the location of the company. I would like to know how many developers have worked on the page and how long it took to get to the current stage. As I’m not interrested in the style too much, I didn’t recognized something ugly at all. I’m looking foreward to see how the direct call will work without using any installed software except flash.
Tamos, our flash telephony platform is capable of initiating and receiving the calls directly from the flash enabled web browser. Although currently we are testing it, a demo is always possible for the limited audience. I am always reachable through contact page.
im sudanies student , am study in india and all my family in sudan so i need to call my family freely .
becuse i didn’t have enought money
try to hep me please .
thank you for assestance