The Jeff Pulver Blog: Congrats to Rebtel on Raising $20 Million. Let the revolution begin!

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September 26, 2006

Congrats to Rebtel on Raising $20 Million. Let the revolution begin!

Congrats to Rebtel for raising US$20 million dollars from Index Ventures and Benchmark Capital.

Ever since I met with Hjalmar Winbladh and the Rebtel team in Stockholm back in August, I knew that they were onto something special. Hjalmar's presentation at our Fall 2006 VON Conference was one of the "wow" moments of Fall VON.

Rebtel is one of the most exciting startups that I have gotten to know this year. While on the surface they may appear to some people to be a “mobile arbitrage play”, there is a lot more going on under the hood that meets the eye. The team of people at Rebtel are both revolutionaries and visionaries and they fully understand the value of “voice as an application” and underlying power of SIP and IP Communications. Simply put, Rebtel is well positioned to become a major force in the emerging world of consumer empowered Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC).

Rebtel’s current go-to-market strategy is to leverage what’s out there today: 2 billion standard mobile phones that consumers know how to use. No special downloads required. The catch? leverage “bucket pricing plans“ by getting consumer to place local phone calls in order to speak with friends and family members across national boarders. While “distance is dead” in the world of the Internet, Rebtel has removed distance from the consumers of mobile phones.

Skype leveraged the PC and broadband. Similarly, Rebtel is leveraging mobile phones and operators’ local minute bucket plans. And they’ve built a 100 percent SIP infrastructure prepared for the future evolution of mobile/wireless communications.

The team at Rebtel is trying to build something that lasts; something that drives fundament change. Just like their wireline cousins, mobile operators are best positioned to be wireless access providers. Wireless operators should not be able to claim ownership of someone or their devices. They should be happy just being access providers.

One of the challenges that any startup faces is being understood. And I find it fascinating how some friends in the blogosphere hear about a new company and make certain underlying assumptions about them and never actually look deep under the hood. I guess they must be jaded. Or tired. Or both. In fact, I'm still trying to understand how someone could compare Rebtel to say Mint Telecom. The consumer economics associated with Rebtel and Mint Telecom are diametrically apart. As far as I understand Mint, if I have 20 International friends with Mint I would pay: (7+(2*20)) or $47 USD/m without even placing doing one call. If I have the same 20 friends listed with Rebtel and I don't call one week, I would pay...nothing. A huge difference if you ask me.

Hjalmar Winbladh

Jonathan Askin caught up with Hjalmar after his talk at Fall 2006 VON and filed this interview for pulver.tv

Tags: voip,rebtel, voip, SIP, skype, Jonathan Askin, Hjalmar Winbladh , Jeff Pulver

(c) 2006 Jeff Pulver. All Rights Reserved.
(This blog posting is copyright protected by Jeff Pulver. Portions of this blog posting may be quoted or abstracted if attributed.)

Posted by jeff on September 26, 2006 08:16 AM | Permalink

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Posted by: plastic molding at May 16, 2009 03:27 AM

Hmm, not too impressed.

Their website is confusing as hell. I don't see how it can grow beyond early adopters. Or grow.

It's a basic call bridge, whooptie doo.

Posted by: CrackGoogle.com at September 27, 2006 03:13 AM

So I told my Mom last night that my new employer prefers cell phones with Long Island exchanges. She said, "Oh, that'll be a toll call for me." I said, well hey, why not check out Rebtel? She said, "sure!"

It's not exactly Rebtel's actual use (international-to-local), but it worked as a hack.

--Chris...

Posted by: Chris Brogan... at September 26, 2006 01:03 PM

September 26, 2006

Congrats to Rebtel on Raising $20 Million. Let the revolution begin!

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