Are you ready to pay for something that is free?

"Of course not!" I hear.

Now remember the last time you lost your credit card under the passenger seat of you car and had to call your bank with your cellphone.

Remember the last time you called your airline to reschedule a return flight.

Remember the last time you reserved a taxi.

Everytime you call a toll-free number from your cell - and you and I know that those calls can be pretty long - you use your precious and costly airtime minutes. Fair?

This is why, we came up with a new convenience app: "Free Airlines Caller", that let you make those long calls over your WiFi, free of any charges, including airtime.

Try it out: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.tribair.freeairlinescaller&feature=search_result

Airlines enrolled:
Aer Lingus, Aeroflot, Aeromexico, Air Canada, Air China, Air France, Air Jamaica, Air Mauritius, Air Pacific, Air Tahiti Nui, AirTran, Alitalia, All Nippon Airways, American Airlines, Asiana Airlines, Austrian Airlines, Avianca, Bangkok Airways, China Airlines, China Eastern Airlines, Condor, Continental Airlines, Copa Airlines, Czech Airlines, EVA Airways, Finnair, Frontier Airlines, Garuda Indonesia, Hawaiian Airlines, Iberia Airlines, Icelandair, Japan Airlines, JetBlue, Kuwait Airways, Lufthansa, Philippine Airlines, Qantas Airways, SAS Scandinavian Airlines, Saudi Arabian Airlines, Singapore Airlines, South African Airways, Southwest Airlines, Spanair, Spirit Airlines, Sun Country Airlines, Swiss International Airline, TAM Brazilian Airlines, TAP Air Portugal, Thai Airways, Turkish Airlines, United Airlines, US Airways, Virgin Atlantic

New Languages

As our app gets used all over the world, we get several requests to support more languages. Being from Canada with a multi-cultural history, it is obvious to support as many languages as possible. By an incredible amount of circumstances, we had a 1960 world map at our office with all the languages spoken. Looking at the number of smartphones and our number of users in every country, we have decide to add as soon as possible the following languages: Italian, German, Russian, Japanese, Deutsch and Arabic.

Having myself lived in Tunisia for a year, I feel I also needed to do something for all my friends back there. The problem with Arabic is that it is read right to left. Some interfaces will have to be re-designed, but we have so many users in Arabic countries that we have to support them with an app in their own language. Finally, in some countries, Tribair calls go through where Skype are blocked. So lets help everyone communicate.

Launch History

I often get questions about my picture on our web site. I was told a few times that the hippie look is out. The picture has nothing to do with marketing or trying to find a look. I really don't care about my look. In fact, I would rather not have any pictures on our site. But that picture comes with a story. It comes from the great Canadian playoff hockey tradition. The playoffs in hockey last around 2 months. The players have the tradition and mostly the superstition of not shaving their beard otherwise it will bring bad luck. There has been some numerous famous beards in the history of hockey. You can look at the top 5 here:

http://theshowsports.blogspot.com/2010/05/top-5-nhl-playoff-beards-of-last-10.html

But my favourite is:

Lanny McDonald winning the Stanley Cup!

At Tribair, we decided to go into playoff mode. Until we launched, everyone got up at 5 in the morning and worked as much as family could support without breaking apart. We couldn't shave or miss a morning until we launched. Needless to say, new features weren't even proposed. The picture was taken right after we had launched. It's a mix of tired and satisfied.

If you want to launch a product quickly, go into playoff mode. It works.

Eric

Tribair's Latest App for iPhone, Android and Blackberry Declares War on VoIP Call Restrictions

Tribair declares freedom of speech for all countries. With freedom of speech must also come the right to make free and inexpensive phone calls around the world. Tribair launched a new self-adaptive technology allowing everybody to make VoIP calls, even in countries where VoIP is blocked by carriers or governments.

Tribair has declared war on all countries preventing users from making VoIP phone calls. The government or any monopole can no longer control the telecom industry of a country. In an unprecedented move, Tribair's newest release contains new technology helping users make free and inexpensive phone calls through the Internet. The technology adapts to changes in the Internet to find a safe way out of any country. Tribair is committed to continue to evolve its technology to ensure world wide service. Tribair is the #1 productivity app in several countries and continues to grow everywhere. Furthermore, Tribair rates are very low at 45% cheaper than Skype and works in countries where Skype is blocked.

"We strongly believe in freedom of speech. With freedom of speech must also come the freedom to make free and inexpensive phone calls around the world. Freedom of speech is the first step towards freedom for the people. More specifically, we are trying to solve the problem for users who are blocked from making legal phone calls by telcos or Internet service providers. These problems occur more than people think all over the world, in countries like Brazil, Chile, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and South Korea to name only a few", Eric Reiher, CEO Tribair.

Tribair offers free VoIP calls between users, as well as free text, voice, photo and video messages. Calls are placed using any WiFi network or on a 3G data or better network. In case a user doesn't own a WiFi or is traveling, maps are available with over 250 000 free WiFi hotspots around the world.

Eat ONLY your dog food

Everyone involved in a startup uses their app as much as they can. In our case, we decided to push it one step further. Our app is mostly useful for long distance calling. I have an iPhone and I pay a carrier to make phone calls. I didn't totally cancel my carrier, I needed it for my data plan and to receive calls. But anywhere I am, when I need to make a phone call, I use Tribair, local call or not. If there isn't a WiFi near by, I just call using my data plan. The experience has been very useful. The ultimate goal in eating your dog food is to improve your app. In my case, I was mostly interested in improving call quality. Over time, we were able to cut the delay between callers and actually improve the quality of the sound. We did a lot of quality testing and surveys. I shamelessly called Canadian embassies across the world to collect recordings with different settings and play them back to people so they could rate the calls. We found out that their rating was directly proportional to the volume of the call. The louder the call, the higher the rating. In the newest version 1.2.1, calls are louder and users can increase the volume directly in the app, during a call. Nowadays, most of the time the person called doesn't even know that I'm using a VoIP service, and I don't tell them. It's becoming normal to have high quality calls.

Using it all the time also came with a few nasty surprises. When I'm near a subway station at peak hours, using my data plan is not a good idea. The network gets congested and the sound sucks big time. But other than that, it has worked perfectly. Even in crowded coffee shops, WiFi has never been a problem.

Eric

Professional Bloggers

Bloggers can play a major role in a startup's success. Famous bloggers can destroy or make a startup famous with just a few posts. Their blogs are a good source of information to major mainstream publications. A blog can inspire a national newspaper article and can be the start of widespread adoption of a new technology. Sales can skyrocket instanteneously.

But Bloggers need to make a living. Most of the famous bloggers blog full time, and earn their living by charging for their services. Everyone needs to make a living but I have a big problem with impartiality. When I buy a newspaper, the journalist is paid by the paper, not by any advertising company directly. If he needs to write a bad article about a company, he can. There are exceptions, a newspaper owned by a big company will never write a bad article about another sector of the same company. People can read between the lines. But bloggers, everything they write might be influenced by who is paying them. There is no way to know if they were paid or not to write the article.

As a startup, we have contacted several bloggers. Some have ignored us completely like GigaOm. But some have taken the time to write about us, for free! One of them is Andy Abramson, a very respected and popular blogger.

http://andyabramson.blogs.com/

And I must admit, we paid a few bucks (we have a very small budget) to have our app reviewed by a two popular web sites. One of these sites:

http://www.theiphoneappreview.com

But unlike others, they includes the following disclaimer:

A small expedite fee was paid by the developer to speed up the publication of this review.

When Submitting an app for review on the iPhone app review, they are very clear. They will decide on your rating, the only thing you can do is ask them not to publish if your rating is bad.

I think all bloggers should have the same ethics as them. Every blog should specify if they were paid to write it or not. I'm not saying paying is wrong and I'm convinced some bloggers are impartial, but readers should be informed when an article was paid for so they can judge by themselves.

Eric

Startup: the dreamers and the schemers

Remember me? I made a post on this blog a couple weeks ago caricaturing myself as the despicable metrics guy at Tribair.

My World is made of numbers, trends, progression bars, red/yellow/green indicators…

I've also been studying Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) for quite a bit now and often try to understand what my
associates's World is made of.

When I do this exercise, their World seems so different from mine that I'm scared. Should I?

No, definitely not!
We are a low fat startup team. I share my DNA with my fellow peers, a startup culture, and a goal. Sharing more would simply be too dangerous to me.
We don't have the same domain expertise, the same management style, the same age, the same stress factors…

But, what is the perfect startup team made of? all startup blogs have an answer, here is mine: it's made of only one person: Steve Jobs.
NLP again, can we modelize Jobs's brain and reproduce his thinking process? What an exciting project…

• Jobs is human, he sees (human) problems and knows how to humanly fix them with technologies
• Jobs knows how to drive, how to drive a project, how to drive a team
• Jobs understands how to reach, talk to and sell to the people whose problems are being solved

Very few people have all three skills, and even if they come close, they are rarely in perfect balance.

I am not Steve Jobs, and chances are you are not either. Is Tribair collectively a Steve Jobs? are you?

Let me rephrase, I'm not a Steve Jobs yet. Yes, it also takes a lot of ego to succeed :)