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September 14, 2006
Truphone's Cheese-y HQ And Its Wifi-VOIP Service Launch
Truphone, the British startup that offers VOIP software for WiFi enabled smartphones, launched in beta mode this week. We can't review it because we don't have a Nokia smartphone - we're either too cheap or too poor to buy one.
But we can write that it's hiring and that it might be an interesting place to work. For one thing it seems to have a dedicated early stage backer in the form of Alexander Straub of Straub Ventures, which definitely adds a bit of adrenaline to starting up the business. (More on that below.)
For another it offers good salaries (not sure if it also has stock options) and if you like cheese, its headquarters will appeal.
Truphone is (surely) the world's only tech start-up based on a working organic farm. Crockhamdale is a hand-made sheep's milk cheese, Wensleydale style. Delicious to eat, but quite tricky to find.
Truphone's HQ its located in Edenbridge, Kent in the South of England.
Image source: ecard hever hotel, edenbridge, kent
It has a brand manager job on offer. The requirements offer a clue about corporate culture. The manager should be "very new media savvy – you know your RSS from your elbow and can hold your own talking about blogs, Flickr, Digg et al; Smart and keen to learn/contribute; Marketing aware with two years experience" and there's a Product Test Manager job on offer that's paying about double what you'd get paid in Germany or south of France for the same title.
We wrote a post on Truphone a while ago and since then Straub informs us that of all the alpha-trial users, he's the one that has racked up the most minutes on his two Nokia smartphones.
The service, like others offering IP services on the phone, requires the user to download a free client and subsequently enables free phone calls to other Truphone users and to some fixed line numbers in the UK, US, Canada and a few other countries during the beta trial.
He also talks up Truphone at industry conferences and took the time to add to our first impression of Truphone.
This suggests to us that Straub is the kind of investor you'd want to have on board. There are not too many VCs in Europe that call themselves early stage investors who work like that. He's one of them.
Another is Mangrove Capital. Its partners, such as Mark Tluszcz who works closely with portfolio firm Allpeers, the company that recently lauched a P2P filesharing plugin for the Firefox browser, do it too. Just Google his name plus Allpeers and you'll see why we say that.
One other, who we see doing it is Barry Maloney of Benchmark who is racking up the air miles and talking up Bebo, the social networking site for teenies.
Read -Truphone Backer Touts Free Mobilephone Calls Over WiFi (alarm:clock euro)
Read - Barry Maloney On Bebo Business Models (e-consultancy newsletter)
Posted on September 14, 2006 06:57 AM | Posted to VoIP | Wireless | Permalink
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