David Beckemeyer, client and friend, showed me the latest big idea he has with PhoneGnome and Stuart beat me to the blog.
Using his Nokia N70 David has created an XML application that grabs his PhoneGnome phone directory that works with their version of Click2Call and lets you make a call from your cell phone but where PhoneGnome calls both parties.
Now what makes this huge? In the USA it’s just cool. But in Europe and other parts of the world where incoming calls are free on the cell phone and the outbound call from the landline ends up being local is the cost of making a call went way down. This is especially valuable when the third leg of the call is international. Now a user can have cheap international Long Distance on the PhoneGnome, but make the call from the cell phone. Since mobile operators don’t let you choose your LD provider this is a way around that.
Sweet !
Andy,
in Europe (at least here in Austria) calls from a landline to a mobile phone are never local calls. Quite the contrary: they are one of the most expensive calls you can make.
If you have a half-way decent package on your mobile, then calls TO a landline will be quite cheap.
This is very asymetric: mobile->landline is often 1cent/min. The other way round you have to expect 20cent/minute.
Those mobile terminate fees have strange effects indeed.
(And guess what? The mobile operators are terrified of services which use second-stage dialing behind a geographic number.)