Everyone loves a free lunch, so just about everyone should love ooVoo, at least until the end of the month.
The video conferencing company has just launched its new VoIP to landline/mobile phone service and is kicking things off with a month of free calls to the United States and Canada. That’s right, free calls from your computer to anyone’s phone and with no advertisements to ruin the party.
The best part: the company isn’t collecting credit card numbers so you don’t have to worry about canceling an account by March 1st. The worst part: no support for Macs. And the most worrisome part, its disclaimer:
ooVoo reserves the right to change the offer at any time with no notice.
Let’s hope the service’s popularity won’t force it to cut things short.
While we haven’t covered ooVoo before, the Israeli company offers an impressive range of videoconferencing capabilities including six-person video sessions, video stream recording, and in-call video effects.
Didn’t Skype do this for a while?
Here’s my writeup from this morning on the news:
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....g-software
The powerful part of this update is really in the recording piece more than the free calls aspect since the free calls are very limited. Though using a callback function, I bet overseas users will figure out a way to make calls worldwide using it.
According to : http://www.oovoo.com//features/FreePhoneCalls.aspx
FREE phone calls to the USA and Canada available through March 1, 2008.
Does anybody care about free calls any more?
All my calls are already free through Skype and via my Sprint plan.
exactly, why would people care about free calls within the U.S. with Skype and cell phone plans…? the six-person video sessions is kind of cool though
Does anybody care about “Sofphones” any more?
I mean who uses Skype etc. anymore, voip over your normal Phone is much more comfortable.
I think all all the voip brands did this initially.
A lot of Israeli startups coming out suddenly.
Is’nt this what every other VoIP do initially??? Well I guess we can know ony after March 1st…
bookmarked @ http://livbit.com
Its normal to first offer a free period so that people can get to know the service but what I like is the six-person video sessions. Those could be really handy.
I wonder if any of these companies will allow people to call from a landline/mobile to a ooVoo or Skype user account.
My friends are all on Skype and I am not allowed to use it at work, so I would be so happy to call to a Skype account from my work phone.
I imagine this like this: let’s say the username is John1, I call a 1-800 number and then have to enter the username. I do it like this: I enter 56664466#1, which is: 5 is for “j” (first digit on key 5), 666 is for “o” (third digit on key 6), 44 is for “h”, 66 is for “n”, then #1 is for “1″ - to differentiate beteen letters and digits I would place the number sign before each digit. (This principle I got from typing sms messages on my cell phone.)
Then, my friend gets the call from me.
Don’t ask me about how/who to bill for this service, and also please don’t laugh at my stupid suggestion - it just seems so easy to use and would be cool to have something like that.
Cheers.
Don’t ask me how to
Correct me if I am wrong but http://www.icall.com has been free since 2006 and the quality is great. I am using them to call Canada and US land lines. How ooVoo is different?
israelcrunch.com is still available.
better get on it. oh wait, techcrunch is the same thing
Looks good but beyond one month freebie where is the big benefit? MikeT has a great point. If they can allow that it will be really cool.
I would like to see this in Europe. Damn, it is going to be difficult when the free month ends!
If you’d like to try out the Mac version before it’s publicly available, you can find it at: http://www.myoovooday.com.
Cool… Nice free Lunch and dinner too
as we speak at nights 