MINO Mobile VoIP Service crosses 100,000 users
By Vivek Puri | September 24th, 2006 at 10:30 pm ET
Mobile VoIP service MINO Wireless has announced that more than 1,00,000 users have registered for its service since its launch in May 2006. MINO is located in a Sunnyvale, CA and is headed by Jing Liu. Earlier this year in April, MINO Wireless had raised $1.5M in Series A from TNP on the Road (Japan/Silicon Valley Fund), Freeze, AWE net, and angel investors in Silicon Valley and Asia.
Selling point for MINO is its really low priced rate plan. You can call number of countries for 2.2 cents which includes UK, Israel, Singapore,…MINO is offering the rate of $.099 for India, which is one of the lowest that I have ever come across. Another great feature is that you can call you contacts on their mobile as well as landline phones.
Calling using MINO is less intricate as compared of other VoIP offerings. You can use MINO on your mobile phone in two ways. You download and install MINO’s Java application on your mobile or from your mobile phone go to http://getmino.com to use MINO WAP. MINO WAP requires your mobile phone to have a built-in web browser that meets WAP browser requirements. MINO Java application works on Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile Edition, and Symbian SmartPhones.
Using MINO interface you can dial your contacts phone number. MINO rings your phone number within 15-30 seconds, and than your contacts number to establish the call. What you will be charged for is the Local airtime fees if you are on mobile. You will also be charged the MINO Account rates for international call from your pre-paid MINO Account. You will need a data plan if you are using MINO for Java enabled mobile phones. MINO takes up 1 KB bandwidth per call.
Calls can also be made from PC browser based application by logging into your account. Just like the mobile app, PC browser application first calls your number and than calls your contact to establish the call.
Right now MINO is offering potential customers free calls worth $0.5 to try out their service. MINO currently works on Sprint, Verizon in US and Bell Mobility in Canada. I gave the service a try on my blackberry by the installing the Java application that went through without errors. The call quality was as good as what I get from my regular Verizon call.
Personally I feel this service has great potential among people who want to be calling across countries.
Links:
Mino
Tags: StartupSquad, VoIP, Wireless, Mobile
on October 24th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
[…] Talkster has a fresh outlook on providing cheap calls and reducing the complexities in contact list management. Talkster is coming into an area dominated by startups like Jajah, Rebtel, Mino, Fring, and Gtalk2VoIP, with each of them having their own unique ideas and implementation. Talkster’s own plan is to enable people to communicate using their existing devices in a much more efficient manner. Using Talkster people can call from their mobile phone to their instant messaging buddies on AOL, MSN, Google Talk, and Gizmo, for free. Talkster also enables call from mobile phones to PSTN, VoIP, and mobile numbers for cheap rates. […]
on October 27th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
I know another company use both SMS
and VoIP to provide similar service:
http://www.gta-wireless.com/SMS_call_en
This is even better since every average
user can use that.
on January 16th, 2007 at 12:30 am
[…] With this release, our ever growing list of startups enabling free or near free mobile calling now includes Nimbuzz, Fring, Truphone, Jajah, Rebtel, Mino, Talkster, and Talkonaut. […]
on January 19th, 2007 at 11:12 am
[…] […]
on February 7th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
[…] On the other hand, it seems that SIPphone/Gizmo is struggling to define direction and gain traction with users. SIPphone is now giving the web-based Gizmocall users 5 minutes of FREE calling per day without registering, or 10 minutes per day when they register. Even Mino is giving some rebates for its mobile service. I am not sure what will be the shelf life for the half-way technologies like Jajah, or Mino, or Gizmocall, when Fring, Nimbuzz, and Truphone are rapidly expanding their feature set and device coverage, and enable unlimited-time calls for free. […]
on February 15th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
[…] Last time I had written about MINO was when it had registered its100Kth user. That was 5 months back. A lot has changed in these ensuing months(Fring, Truphone, Jajah….to name a few) which makes it hard for me understand such a big investment. MINO claims that people can make cheaper international calls using its service from their mobile phones via a mobile app or WAP browser. Offering only cheaper calls to any phone, anywhere in the world, is a losers game. Jajah, Gizmo, SunRocket, and many more are already it. Once again for comparison purposes lets talk about cost of call to India from US. MINO -12.4 cents, Jajah – 9 cents, SunRocket - 8 cents, RelianceIndiaCall - 7.4 cents, Startec - 7.9 cents. All these are still much better than 17.7 cents that Skypeout charges or 17.4 cents that Gizmo does. Clearly MINO is not the winner nor the loser. Calling card route is not the easiest in the shorter term but it is going to be the winner as it seems. On the top of these higher rates, MINO also requires you to have a data plan or at least use date network to initiate calls. These are additional $$’s that go unaccounted for. […]