With Internet, you can sure do a lot of stuff on your smartphone. But handheld Internet is yet to reach the larger crowd in India and folks at Bangalore are trying to come up with solutions for the less Internet savy people. The service, called as FreeKall, brings voice-over-internet like services to those without the Internet.
With FreeKall, all you have to do is to dial their number – 08067683693. Once the user dials the number, the call is disconnected after a ring. And then, the system calls back the user prompting him to enter the number to which he wants to make a call. The system then connects the call. This is where the trick begins – instead of hearing a ringing tone on the call, the user hears an advertisement.
That is not the end of Ads ofcourse. In between the call, for every two minutes, you and the other person will hear an Ad during which the call will be paused and the call resumes once the Ad is over. For now, unregistered users can make calls up to 3 minutes and registered users can make calls up to 12minutes. The team hopes to improve their infrastructure and claim that users can soon make unlimited calls for any number of minutes as long as they are willing to hear ads for every two minutes.
This is clearly a tactic for emerging markets and when the service is fully operational, a lot of people will be seen making use of it.