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I just got an email today by Boaz Bechar, co-founder of PokeTalk, a new israeli-based service aimed to offer FREE calls worldwide through the web. The free service’s costs will be covered by showing ads during the call.

The service is very easy to use. It’s a callback VoIP service through which users can call any mobile or landline phone without the need of new devices or handsets and completely for free. Premium services will be available upon the payment of a fee, too.

The service, just out from a private beta period, is currently available in the following countries.

• USA
• Canada
• Israel
• UK (landlines)
• Germany (landlines)
• Singapore
• Japan

Parrot Media, the company behind PokeTalk, declares to provide very tageted ads to their users, which will be shown on the screen to the caller, according to his/her profile. The approach reminds me Pudding Media, the company which launched an innovative platform to offer rich-media ads during phone calls.

The question here is whether this could be a valid model or not. My company launched Chocophone in 2000, a service through which, at that time, we offered free calls by showing a video ad at the beginning of each call. It was not the right period to do this unfortunately (due to the bubble), but we only succeeded to cover costs for one year, no more, even if we built a solid user base of over 700.000 users very quickly.

The problem here is how to attract advertisers without having a huge user base to work with. I guess one of the possible approaches is to offer this platform as a white label solution to companies who really have a huge user base they want to leverage and to share revenues with them. The downside is that those companies will likely make your percentage of revenues very tiny, since they are bringing the users to you.

Anyway, time will tell, and I hope one of this new ad-based VoIP services will finally succeed and will find a viable model to grow up. In the meantime, a big “good luck” to Poketalk!

Technorati Tags: callback, free calls, luca filigheddu, parrot media, poketalk, VoIP