Talkster

Last thursday, Howard and I had dinner in Toronto with Talkster CEO James Wanless.Â Over dinner we discussed impending European market roaming regulations.Â Roaming charges in Europe are viciously high, routinely exceeding 1 euro per minute, depending on the carrier.Â The European Parliament is set to enact regulations by summer of 2007 which would create a European home market, and cap roaming at a fixed percentage above wholesale costs.

If the EU regulation entered into force today and became fully effective, the results of this method for the consumer would be as follows:

the price of calling home from abroad in the EU or calling a third country while abroad in the EU would be at most 49 cents per minute.

the retail price of local calls made whilst on holiday or business in another EU country would be at most 33 cents per minute, and

the retail price for receiving a mobile phone call whilst travelling abroad in another EU country would be capped at 16.5 cents per minute.

All of this helps to explain the high interest in services like Jajah Mobile, Rebtel, and Truphone, which route calls around operator.Â We don’t fully appreciate the cost of roaming, here in North Amerca, where most customers are on bucket plans.Â My package, for instance, costs me roughly C$0.22 (about US$.20) to make calls from any location to any location in the US and Canada.Â Mexico is still prohibitively expensive, but 99% of the calls I make are in the US and Canada.

Even with the new EU regulations, roaming charges would still be high. Services like our own iotum should be very popular in Europe, as they help to contain the cost of those roaming charges by more effectively screening incoming calls.

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Mobile VoIP plays are the rage at the moment.Â According to Om Malik, this morning, Voice 2.0 player TalkPlus will unveil their first offering,Â and announce a $5.5 million series A financing from Menlo Ventures.

TalkPlus is certainly interesting.Â Unlike Jajah, T@lkster, or Rebtel, all of which you’ve read about here in the past, TalkPlus is leading with features, rather than cheap minutes, which is a welcome shift to the next phase in the VoIP market.Â TalkPlus is offering a second number for your mobile phone, to allow people to better manage their personal and work lives, but from a single handset.Â Unlike offerings from handset vendors that have been around for some time, albeit used only by a small number of people, the TalkPlus solution doesn’t require an additional SIM.Â Simply sign up for the service, and the TalkPlus platform takes care of the rest.

Their market entry strategy is to focus on people with privacy needs — in this case, dating.Â Talkplus gives subscribers a unique TalkPlus number for placing and receving dating-related calls, as well as a contact center for better managing those relationships.

Coming this winter, TalkPlus will add the ability to have multipleÂ TalkPlus numbers on a single handset, plus the ability toÂ select outbound numbers to present, including landline numbers, for an additional layer of privacy.Â Oh… and cheap international calling minutes.

Fundamentally, TalkPlus is an identity play that leverages an idiom we’re all familiar with — the telephone number.Â By giving you unique telephone numbers which you can hand out for specific purposes, TalkPlus gives you more control over how and which callers can reach you. It’s a real need, as has been noted repeatedly on these very pages.Â TalkPlus offers the same capabilities as having multiple email addresses, all reaching the same inbox, or multiple IM identities terminating on a single multi-headed IM client.Â

The metaphor is understandable, but the real magicÂ may beÂ in presenting a single identity from any handset.Â With a single contact point presented to the world, the value of one-number solutions is dramatically multiplied.Â Certainly that’s an issue we’ve wrestled with at iotum.Â TalkPlusÂ is a welcome and complementary solution.Â

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