your status, it cascades through all your social networking accounts, whether this includes Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. “The only way Google will incorporate Twitter would be to buy them,” Hertz quipped. As I reported in November, the name VoxOx is a play on “voice over X,” meaning the system can transmit a voice call over any type of network.
A key underlying difference at TelCentris, according to Michael Faught, the company’s president and chief operating officer, is that the founders didn’t come out of the telecommunications industry per se. Instead, they provided data networking and software development for broker/dealers, which requires automating millions of transactions and providing a variety of features used by banks and insurance companies.
In addition to Bryan Hertz, the company’s founders include his brother Kevin, who is the chief technical officer, and father Bob, the chief information officer. They have bankrolled the business themselves, along with some individual angel investors. TelCentris now has 44 employees.
The VoxOx telephone service, which is a free download from the company’s website, features “dial out” capability from a computer, landline, or mobile phone, along with a free phone number, and a variety of free communication services. “Our model is to give away millions of copies of free software that we’ve developed ourselves,” Faught tells me. “If Nortel or somebody else had developed that for us, we would have had to pay a licensing fee of $50 to $100 for each user’s license.”
The VoxOx download provides unlimited free calls to other VoxOx users, and 100 minutes of free outbound phone calls, that is, calls to non-VoxOx users. Out-of-network calls are charged at the rate of a penny a minute in North America, while the rates for international calls vary, depending on what countries are involved.
“The only thing we charge for are our phone calls and text messaging, and at pretty phenomenally low rates,” Faught says. Users can add additional free outbound calling time to their account by referring a friend who signs up for the VoxOx service, or by signing up for targeted advertising that provides “VoxOx points” for watching certain commercials. “Think of it as frequent flyer miles or American Express points,” Faught says.
Faught explains that TelCentris makes money in a variety of ways. It owns a CLEC, or Competitive Local Exchange Carrier, a business that provides voice and data services that is not one of the traditional telephone companies, which enables TelCentris to collect money for each inbound call from outside networks. TelCentris also generates revenue by powering small telephone companies with its communications service platform, as well as providing hosted switchboard service to small-to-medium customers.
CTO Kevin Hertz told me that when the company introduced its fully featured communications tool in November, they expected to eventually get 5,000 beta users. “We got that many on the first day,” Kevin says, “and before we knew it, we had over 100,000 beta users.”
He says VoxOx2, the upgraded beta version announced today, is being released after the company collected a lot of feedback from its customers. As a result of those recommendations, Kevin says the company has reduced the size of the VoxOx download by a third, reduced the memory required to operate the program, and created a smaller graphical user interface. The personal assistant also was introduced as a new feature of VoxOx2. As Kevin puts it, “We’re unifying all these things because we don’t want you to go anywhere else.”
