On my second last trip to Ireland, Pat Phelan, one of my favorite bloggers, bounced into the speaker’s dinner, handed me a SIM card and bounced right out again. Pat runs MaxRoam, a disruptive new telecoms play. On my recent trip, I put it through its paces.
WHAT IT DOES
MaxRoam helps avoid international roaming charges. Simple.
HOW
They put multiple numbers (all land lines) on the same SIM card. For instance, I have numbers for the U.S, Ireland, UK and Germany. If any of those numbers is called, my phone rings, wherever I am. I pay the local 25 cents (or whatever) charged by the local carrier. It costs 3 euros per month per number and you prepay the service. The SIM costs 25 euros. (Disclosure: because I’m an honorary Cork man, Pat gave me the SIM for free with a bit of credit to play with).
THE PROS
- being landlines, it’s cheap for people to call you
- you can get a new number right from the website and it works instantly (amazing)
- you can forward (for free) any of your numbers to a local landline OR a local mobile and nobody pays. Outside North America, this is monstrously cost-saving as the caller usually pays (a fortune). Here, Maxroam swallows the costs.
- 5 cent SMS worldwide (I didn’t test this)
THE CONS
- you can’t put your current number onto it (but you can forward your number to it)
- forwarding usually works, but occasionally it took 2-3 tries when I used it
- lots of numbers to think about
- you need a totally unlocked phone (I used an old Nokia)
- not the greatest website in the world (but who cares, it works)
OVERALL
After a bit of fiddling to get used to it, I’m hooked. I totally loved the service - can’t imagine traveling without it. Being able to forward a 212 number to a UK mobile and talking for hours for no charge internationally on a mobile was fabulous. I worked out I saved about $185 in my two week trip. The cost for my two weeks of rather frequent calling was about 14 euros. I’m hoping he adds a data service soon.
I think Pat is onto something really huge here. The addressable market for international roaming is monstrous, and creating an MVNO is a very interesting way of attacking it. I wish I could invest (Pat?, nudge wink?). More coverage on VentureBeat and TechCrunch.
Pat, by the way, is also behind Twitterfone.
June 18th, 2008
Wow, how bad a blogger am I (ok, I never really had the moniker anyway). But it’s way long since I updated the ole papyrus. I’ve been back from Europe for 2-3 weeks and it’s been non-stop meetings since. Let’s first start by recapping that trip.
First stop was London - a few meetings and some quality time with my god-daughters (little Irish identical twin girls). Next was Dublin for more meetings - I’m on the advisory board of PutPlace, so met with Joe Drumgoole and then lunch with Joe and Niall Larkin. Joe, after paying for lunch, also organized a very nice little meetup and some interesting folks showed up, including Paul Campbell, Marcus MacInnes, Eoghan McCabe and Dennis Deery. Oh yes, and I said hi to Bill de hÓra for 60 secs as he whizzed by… good to see him again, albeit briefly.
Then it was off to Hamburg, where Sarik Weber invited me to give a keynote address at the Facebook Developer Garage. Nice reviews of my talk here and here (if you read German).
Back in London, Tom Hughes-Croucher took me out to lunch and gave me this birthday card (like, a real one), which I haven’t seen for ages. Thanks Tom!
And finally, I met the BT/Osmosoft chaps… Jeremy Ruston, Paul Downey, Phil Whitehouse, Phil Hawksworth and others. Confabb is doing a very interesting collaboration with them that’ll beta at SuperNova.
June 16th, 2008
A proposal for an Ignite talk I submitted has been accepted for next weeks Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. It’s going to be about the metaphysics of growth, something I’ve been thinking, reading & writing about for about 15 years.
I touched on this topic very briefly at Brad Templeton’s Nanotechnology Conference which we hosted at the Yahoo HQ.
This’ll be the first time I’ve ever talked about some of this stuff publicly, so the response should be interesting. The basic question is: “How does growth happen”? I’ll be talking about the basics of it and then applying the principles to the rapid growth environment of Silicon Valley.
Now all I have to do is write it…
April 15th, 2008
Onto the Q&A… this should be the fun stuff…
Q: Why is x traffic study not being considered in your proposal
A: The study wasn’t done in time
Q: You’re claiming that after 400 new units the traffic will decrease?
A: [[can't hear answer]]
Crowd is getting raucous… “what are you doing about widening x road”?
The questions are specific to individual situations… lots of side conversations starting at the back of the room… some people starting to leave. Some folks getting annoyed. This is fun stuff!
Tough questions now, and the developer folks are trying to keep the conversation civil. Lots of arguments about projected traffic numbers.
UPDATE:
So I talked to some of the attendees afterwards and they said their complaint was that the developer plans to build way too many condos and time shares in Crystal Bay. The resulting project would increase the population of the town by about 4X, cause increased pressure on traffic, fire and pubic resources and be potentially detrimental to Lake Tahoe. Also their studies were curiously out of date. I have not talked to the developers yet, so this is a slightly one-sided viewpoint, but after hearing the presentation, I’d be extremely nervous if I lived there. Here’s a link to the petition if anyone wants their voice heard…
March 19th, 2008
Second speaker is up… mostly talking about road changes
“… we’re putting in guard rails where necessary…”
“… heh heh.. well, that’s it…”
“… if there’s a wildfire, folks can use our parking lots…”
7.50pm - Third speaker, who’s a “traffic engineer” - now talking through the circulation plan. Claiming the traffic is actually declining in the area. Folks are mostly sporting pursed lips…. especially as he’s now estimating 0.5% traffic growth per year for the next 20 years.
March 19th, 2008
Scene-setting: This is my first ever live-blogging effort. I’m in a town hall-type meeting in Boulder Bay, Nevada (on the shore of Lake Tahoe).
The topic is a proposal to tear down the Tahoe Biltmore, a lovely old hotel, and replace it with a 400-unit condo complex. Local residents are not happy, and about 250 of them are in this room listening with some suspicion. Apparently there was an earlier presentation in November which seems not to have gone down very well, especially around traffic congestion.
I’ve never witnessed small-town politics before, so this is new and fun stuff for me.
7.15pm - the developers are nervously starting a powerpoint presentation… sample quotes: “…we know a lot of you are worried about traffic…”
“… this is a work in progress and will continue to evolve… ”
“… tourist-friendly wellness center… ”
“… these projects have a rumor mill… ”
7.25pm - he’s now going through a set of slides diagramming what it’ll look like… lots of acronyms around project approvals
“… we are at the very early stages of this process… it’ll be a long time before anything gets decided… ”
On to the next speaker…
March 19th, 2008
Previous readers of this blog will remember some of the travails with wireless telecoms (here and here). I’m happy to say that a large part of my hassles seem to have resolved themselves. I’ve moved my eight year old mobile number back out of Yahoo and signed up with T-mobile with a Blackberry Curve. I looked cursorily at some options: the iPhone is a non-starter for me without copy/paste, Verizon too expensive and AT&T just too bad… it was a particular T-Mobile feature that finally clinched it (many many thanks to Phil Wolff and Bill Campbell of SkypeJournal for that beauty of a tip). With a $9.99 monthly fee, my BB Curve will route calls over a wifi connection without costing me any minutes. Even better, if I start a call at home and then get into my car, it’ll seamlessly switch me over to the cell network. Given that I’m at a wifi connection about 70% of the time, it essentially means unlimited calling. Amazing to finally see one of the big guys ‘getting it’. In practice, it works most of the time - some calls are a bit VOIPy if the wifi isn’t good. As a final bonus, if I’m overseas, it means I can make U.S bound calls without roaming charges, which is doubly cool.
Which brings me to the final speed bump – international roaming. And for this, all hail Pat Phelan from MaxRoam, who bounced over to the blogger dinner at Blogtalk and left me a SIM and some credit to play with…
MaxRoam is a VMNO where you buy a SIM and phone numbers for countries you are traveling to, and if anyone calls any of those numbers, your handset rings wherever you are and you pay just local cell phone charges of about 25-35 cents. If you bounce around multiple countries, this is definitely for you…
I think Pat is onto something very huge here. The roaming marketplace must be in the billions and nobody is attacking it in such an interesting way.
The holy grail would be if I could use my Curve for laptop connectivity. That’s a lot to ask, but hey, it’s worked so far… : )
March 15th, 2008
This is officially conference insanity. I just came from Ireland, where I gave the opening keynote address at BlogTalk 2008. Awesome conference and I met some great folks for the first time. Cork, of course, is an old haunt and I love Murphy’s. Pat Phelan again saved my bacon (more about that in another post)
Now I’m in Austin at South by SouthWest (SxSW). It’s my first time here… total zoo, and I’m loving it. SxSW is Twitter central and you can’t do anything if you’re not using it. We had a Fire Eagle party that was off the charts.
Then, In late March, I’m speaking at the ICE Conference in Toronto. Sarah and Ian always put on excellent conferences, so that should be good fun.
The one I’m most looking forward to, however, is the Content Convergence and Integration conference in Vancouver next week. I’m giving a keynote address there and will be touching on XML in the travel industry (a space I know a little bit about). There’s a good interview with Rahel Bailie here.
This is all good on-the-ground practice as I put a few cycles into Confabb , which now has over 65k conferences in its database.
March 10th, 2008
Today is one of the happiest days I’ve had in a long time. Why? Well, Fire Eagle launched.
I was in London at the Yahoo UK office for the big moment, and had a couple of pints in the local pub with Tom Croucher-Hughes to celebrate.
I mentioned it in my opening keynote at BlogTalk 2008 in Cork on Monday and I’m now heading to Austin to celebrate with Tom and the crew. It’ll be a hell of a party.
Fire Eagle is a truly game-changing platform that has the potential to shift the internet to the next level. It’s not often you can say that. The team has been working super hard getting this out the door and deserve monster congratulations. Rabble gives some color to it here, and for more detail, Stephanie Booth recaps Tom’s presentation at FOWA here.
Update: here’s Tom’s announcement on YouTube
March 5th, 2008
Well, after a bunch of soul-searching, I’m leaving Yahoo. I have a couple of startups that I want to look at and I took the opportunity to take a decent package. The folks at Yahoo have been fabulous and I’ve got a very nice and very gracious goodbye. I had a total blast and it was a great year at a really great company.
Even though I’m going, I’m going to continue to help the team launch Fire Eagle as needed. There’s also a truckload of threads to tie up. This’ll wind out over the next few weeks while I stir up my next gig.
My personal email address is my first name at this domain if you want to get in touch. I don’t know how many days longer my Yahoo email will be on…
February 12th, 2008
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