Make (free) International Phone Calls Using Your Mobile Phone With Zoo.Tok

Startup Zoo.Tok allows you to make international phone calls from your mobile to anywhere in the world–The price? 50 pence a call or a little over $1.00.

Now aside from the fact that Zoo.Tok allows you to make phone calls using your mobile phone, you might be asking yourself what the value is in using Zoo.tok when VOIP services like Skype allows you to make calls for as low as $0.03 per minute? Well, at its per-call price, Zoo.tok allows you to make one call and talk AS LONG AS YOU WANT.

Zoo.Tok also passes the “Mom Test” and can’t be any easier to use. All you need to do is register your mobile phone number (using what they claim is The World’s Shortest Formtm), send an SMS containing the number of the party you wish to call to +447800000319 and zoo.tok automatically connects you.

Alternatively, you can login to your zoo.tok account and make phone calls from there.

You get two free calls upon registration and after you’ve used those up, you have the option to top up your account with £1.00, £5.00, £10.00, or £20.00 values.

A tip to Filipino readers: What can you do with Zoo.tok, disposable email addresses, and cheap, 30-Peso Sim Cards?

Cheap ass.

Customer Service:Web 2.0 Style

It’s fascinating how the internet is slowly becoming a catalyst that causes a paradigm shift in even the most stubborn, most stodgy company’s way of doing business. This is most noticeable in the banking industry–Typically, banks rely on transactions being inconvenient and time consuming to consequently be able to charge fees that make up a sizable chunk of their revenue. I mean, how many times have you been slapped with additional charges on your loan or bill payment because you were too lazy to go to the bank the day your payment was due?

The proliferation of online bill payment and other services such as fund transfer and balance checking is testament to how the internet could take a company by the balls, flip its model and make it web-enabled willingly or in most cases, unwillingly.

With the highly touted community-based and collaborative features of Web 2.0 and with traditional companies realizing the potential of how the internet can improve their business more and more, I think there’s no better time for startup internet companies to take advantage of the virtually untapped market that are the late adopters.

Sadly, more often than not, most startups are in a seemingly ‘monkey see, monkey do‘ model. Seriously, if I fucked a hooker for every time a startup company comes up with a digg, MySpace, Linked In, Face Book or YouTube rip-off, I’d be a ho-man petri dish of STD’s already.

Enter, Satisfaction: one of the few products nowadays where I see a lot of promise in. In a nutshell, Satisfaction is People-powered Customer Service for Absolutely Everything.

Led by a team composed of some of the people responsible for what is now Google Analytics, is an advanced forum of sorts with topics categorized by companies up for discussion.

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On Globe Telecom’s re-branding

One of the more specialized areas of interest my career has led me to study would be corporate branding and positioning. I’ve done a lot of in-depth branding proposals for both foreign and local companies in the telecommunications and internet verticals.

The most critical part of any branding or repositioning campaign would have to be the conceptualization of the company’s or brand’s new logo. The logo is the central element of a company or a brand’s image and must be easily identified with the industry/product/service and must be able to give a clear picture of what is being marketed.

For this reason, the conceptualization of the logo is often where a disconnect between marketing people like myself and design people like FOBCast Co-conspirator Site guy Marco occurs.

Anyway, you may or may not have noticed Globe Telecom’s recent re-branding efforts. Now Globe, being one of the few players in the country’s telecommunication industry, I doubt that the aforementioned re-branding would have any significant or even noticeable impact on the company’s bottom line. Here are, however, a few of my observations as far as their re-branding efforts would go:

Overall Design:

The trend I notice with telecommunications, internet or any company that markets bleeding edge technology for that matter is that their logos are generally chiseled in the sense that designs usually have clean and precise outlines as if cut along the edges. They are also, more often than not angular and avoid any elements that are supple. This way, a perception of being innovative or being at the forefront of innovation is achieved.

This can be observed through the logos of other full-service telecommunication companies like Verizon:

or Sprint:
Or even local competitor, SMART telecommunications:
Looking at Globe’s new logo, It looks as if they’re going for the “everything within your reach (data, voice, video and music on demand, etc.)” feel or something to that effect. It’s hard to say though since the logo itself looks like it was crammed shitfull of icons and has this uncanny resemblance to a shape-o toy.
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FOBcast - Third World Tech Talk and a lot of dicking around

In this episode, Marco and I talk about:

Our App picks this week:

 
icon for podpress  Standard Podcast [67:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

4 Alternative uses for Twitter

I’ve been using Twitter for quite some time now and even if I am, quite possibly, one of the biggest Twittervangelist out there, I sometimes get tired of dicking around a medium whose purpose seems to be limited to sharing real-time brain farts, idle, incoherent blabbering and general blather to your friends and anyone who has time to burn reading inane musings of people they hardly even know.

But being a certified Fanboi, I will forgo the long, substantive essay I am tempted to write to justify and explain why I continue to use Twitter because face it, the issue of “To Twitter or not to Twitter” is beat. And really, why should I even bother when far better writers have written their respective cases against twitter and pieces in its defense?

Besides, for every argument rebuking its asininity, there’s one that praises its merits.

There is, however, more to Twitter than broadcasting how awesome the fillet mignon you had for dinner was or how bored you are out of your fucking skull to your followers. Let’s take a look at some of its alternative uses.

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