A Friend of mine has a son named Jacob who’s recently started a blog.  He interviewed me for his science project on 3G speeds from AT&T, but that’s for another post.  He just posted a new blog about his interview with the CEO of Kajeet, a mobile phone service for kids.  I’ve reposted it below and hope you like it, if you do then head out to his blog and leave a comment.

Following my recent post comparing two companies that sell phones for kids, Kajeet and Firefly [What Kids Want in Phones], I had an interview Monday, April 5 with Daniel Neal, the CEO of Kajeet together with my friend Emma, and I would like to share with you a little about what I learned from his 14 years in the telecom business.

The first thing I wanted to know was how do families find out about Kajeet? He explained that he places a lot of links on Google, does some radio advertising, and also puts advertisements on websites. In fact, the day after my interview, I was watching videos on YouTube and a Kajeet ad came up!

As a kid who loves technology, I then wanted to know how often does Kajeet update their phones? Mr. Neal told me that they try to update their phones 3 to 4 times a year.

With many of the big phone companies today adding the Android OS to their phones, I was happy to hear that Kajeet is also planning on adding Android phones to their line-up, and one might even come out this year.

I really wanted to learn from him about how do kids manage to convince their families to buy them a Kajeet phone? His answer was that kids usually keep asking and asking for a phone. He said that what makes Kajeet special is that when parents finally go online to find phones for kids, they find out that Kajeet has especially designed many things to give the adults lots of control of the phones and their phone plans. For example, he explained how he has set his own kids’ phones to not be able to call anyone except for their parents during school hours, but can text as much as they want after school.

My friend, Emma asked some excellent questions about what are the popular phones with kids today. Mr. Neal talked about how the Sanyo 2700, LG Rumor and LG Rumor 2 are popular because they all have full QWERTY keyboards that make them good for texting. She also asked about the differences between the Katana phones, and he explained that besides the design changes, there is a new higher tech chip in theKatana II which includes 4 times more memory and helps the phone also weigh less. He told us that the first phone the company had at the beginning was the Nokia 2155, and how today he does not have any phones from Nokia on Kajeet because that company has decided for now to focus on the rest of the world and not the US, but he thinks that Nokia will be big again in the US within the next two years.

At the end of our interview we had a fun conversation about the unique logo they have for the company, and he laughed and asked us what we thought, and then told us that they call the logo “KJ” and it is a smiley face. We also found out the company’s name is taken from the first letter of each of the 6 kids of all the three people who started the company.

I really enjoyed speaking to Daniel Neal, and I liked how much he thinks about what us kids want, and even said that some people say that he is still a kid at heart himself.

I had a great chat with Di-Ann Eisnor of Waze back at Mobile World Congress over a month ago then we got to hang at CTIA and I’m just now getting around to putting up my content from the trip.  I really like what Waze is doing and if you haven’t checked them out be sure to do so.  It’s an amazing social mapping program that creates the maps from the trips it’s users take.

Thanks for your time Di-Ann and best of luck with Waze.

I got to spend some time with Raam Thakrar and Ed Hodges from Touchnote.com during CTIA and had a blast.  They were a ton of fun, we talked about how irresponsible we’ve been at work to Middle East politics and I got to learn all about what Touchnote is.

I get to see all kinds of mobile phone apps and sometimes have businesses pitched at me.  Touchnote is the very best app I’ve seen of late.  I believe these guys have a really great product and have a good chance of going all the way with it (Raam, Ed call me I have some ideas for you).

I imagine people getting a BT message when they arrive at a resort offering them Touchnote and they can just tack on $5 to their room and get to send out a few postcards.  Come on this is genius.

I got to spend some time with Karl Good of Truphone over the past 2 days at the ITExpo and have been reminded how much I like the best mobile VOIP service available today.  Karl gave me an ultra secret briefing, please don’t ask me what we chatted about, I won’t tell you.  No amount of sodium pentothal will crack me, I’m not going to share with you how many great things are coming from Truphone.  Things are changing and Truphone is staying on top of it all and doing some amazing things along the way.

I’ve been a Truphone user from what feels like the beginning.  It’s probably been about 3 years or so.  I was one of the early testers and have been enjoying and evangelizing the service to as many people as will listen ever since.

For anyone that doesn’t know about Truphone, it’s a mobile phone service provider at heart.  They started as a mobile VOIP service offering, the best in class then and now.  They have evolved from supporting Symbian S60 wifi phones only to now being on Blackberry, Android, the iPhone/Touch and of course still S60.  They own an international roaming sim card company (Sim4Travel) and have expanded their service offering to include multiple calling options/plans to save money when dialing internationally or if you are abroad.  They are also the 1 and only VOIP company I know of that supports sending and receiving sms.

I have so many stories I can tell you about how Truphone has saved me time, money and hard ache.  I’ll share just one quick experience.  I was staying with family in their guest room in the basement.  I didn’t get any reception down there but had to make some plans.  So instead of having to be upstairs with all the noise of the kids and TV I stayed in my comfy room and used their wifi to take care of my calls.  This is just one example, there are so many more but why don’t you make your own experiences with Truphone, give the service a try.  I can almost guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

A few weeks ago I attended Java One in San Francisco so I could blog about emoze (a client) and got to meet Moshe Dgani one of the 2 creators of emoze.  Moshe was nice enough to spend some time with me and asked if in my blogging I could share some features of emoze that he didn’t think everyone knew about.  I for one didn’t know about many of these and I’ve been using emoze for a while now.

I wrote about some features recently and as promised I’m continuing here with the rest that Moshe talked to me about.

• Add a personalized signature, this is a great feature that I’ve been asked about a few times.  As a side note and I’m only telling you this because you read my blog, Moshe told me a secret. Separate signatures for each email address is coming soon.
• There is a roaming indicator icon to show you if you’re roaming and may get charged additionally for using data.  On Nokia’s it’s right next to the little bow tie icon showing you’re connected to your email in the messaging folder.
• There is a setting where you can decide if you want emoze to show you how many unread messages you have.
• This is a very cool feature, BCC Alert. Follow me here, if you were in the BCC of an email you got and you click reply all, you are warned so you don’t accidentally send something out you shouldn’t.
• emoze supports meeting request responses.  This is a big deal for some people, it gives the user the ability to respond yes, no or maybe to a meeting request.  Also Windows Mobile users can send meeting requests from their phones via emoze.
• One of the nicest features for people who don’t want to be bothered by email on certain days or times of the day is scheduled retrieval.  You can set emoze to only retrieve from 9am to 5pm on weekdays if you desire or configure it any way you would like.  Maybe you don’t want to get your email on the weekends, well so be it now.
• Moshe specifically wanted me to let people know, because he has gotten this question many times.  Checking 4 email address uses basically the same amount of battery as checking 1 email address.  So people should not hesitate to connect all their email address if they are concerned about battery life.

I want to mention something I have read and been told about emoze that I found very interesting myself.  Data usage is very minimal with emoze.  You can save (and this is just an educated estimate I read) about 80% on data by using emoze because of their world class compression methods.  I was told that emoze works via TCP not HTTP so that is one of the data saving techniques.

If you find any of this interesting don’t think twice, go ahead and download emoze and use 1 email address or 1 Facebook ID for free forever.  If you like it though you can get a Pro account for about $13/year (that’s in the US, it may vary in your country).  With a Pro account you can collect messages from multiple email and Facebook accounts.  Head out to www.emoze.com on your handset (almost all Java enabled phones and smart phones are supported by emoze), download it and give it a spin.  If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact me via the comments below, at Jeb@emoze.com or on Twitter at @JebBrilliant or @emozepushemail.

I recently returned from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where I interviewed Rafi Ton the CEO NewACT.  I met  Rafi because my good friend Harel Shattenstein of TalkingMobile.com set up the interview.  We decided to sit outside in the absolutely gorgeous weather and discuss NewACTs mobile application called vufone, the most interesting new app I saw at MWC, for the sake of transparency I may be a little prejudice because NewACT is a new client of my companies.

vufone is a back up/restore and sync service with Google or Outlook (at the moment) with a large array of handsets.   The whole app is interesting but I don’t use Outlook anymore so I’m jumping at the chance to sync my Google contacts and calendar to my current Nokia, the N79.  I have already completed a sync and I am thoroughly impressed with vufone.

Right now my only complaint is how often you can sync automatically it’s  weekly, biweekly, monthly or manual.  I would like to see an update to this as soon as possible.  We need to have more options like once a day, hourly, etc.

UPDATE:  I got an email from Rafi over the weekend and he informed me that you are able to sync every hour and in the premium version it’s actually every 30 min. Great news and I still have more to learn about vufone. 

Anyway, as far as I know vufone is the only option for syncing Google Calendar/Contacts at this price range.  For the month of March it’s $10 for a year and you can try it free for 14 days.   Anybody who has ever lost their mobile will tell you they would gladly pay big bucks to have their data back.

I’m only covering one of the many aspects of this application, the aspect that interests me the most.  There’s also a calendar, contacts, file, picture, video, document, and text message back up sharing side to this amazing app.

Watch the short interview I did with their CEO last week in Barcelona.

Go give vufone a try, it won’t hurt and you never know, it may turn into your “can’t live without app”.

What a wild time I had last week.  I spent the week in Barcelona, Spain attending Mobile World Congress.  I met hundreds of people and gave out and received hundreds of business cards.

I also interviewed a handful of really interesting people.  I hope to write up all my interviews but in the mean time I’m going to post a short intro from my guests here so you can don’t have to wait forever.

This is Rafi Ton, the CEO of NewACT.  We’re talking about vufone their very exciting mobile app.

Here is Kerry Ritz of Palringo and one of the winners of TopMobile20. Congratulations Palringo.

This is Andrew Grill talking about Gigafone.

This is Veronica Livshits from DSPV.

This video is of Boaz Zilberman one of the founders of Fring

This is Oliver Starr who is the voice behind ShapeWriter.  Oliver swears this app speeds up his input into his touch handsets.

This is Nilo Garcia Manchado the CEO of econav a really interesting green tool

Here’s the Sonim “indestructible handset” according to my MIR Review buddies.

This is the Q1 from Blue Ant. For the sake of transparency they gave me a BT headset (not a Q1 unfortunately), thanks guys.

By Jeb Brilliant
Chief Editor
I had a really nice conversation with Jeff Rice today.  He’s the CEO at DeFi Mobile (disclosure, they provide me with VOIP).  I had some pointed questions I wanted to ask but we started off with what they are up to right now (the good stuff).  First though I should tell you that DeFi is a Mobile VOIP provider, working over wifi networks with a list of thousands it auto connects to and only costs $40/month for unlimited calls.

Now to let the cat out of the bag, DeFi has their app being reviewed by the iPhone people so they can get it into the iPhone App Store.  This is big for people living in the States.  There are many times more iPhones here then Nokia N and E Series devices, so they hope this means that the general public here in the US will start to download DeFi on to their iPhones and get a taste of Mobile VOIP.  And DeFi will be offering all new accounts a 101 free minutes anytime and to anywhere in the world.  So you can call landlines and mobiles.  You will also be able to always call for free other DeFi users, other VOIP providers, iNum #rs, Google Chat folks, and hopefully soon Skype folks.  So that’s what’s going on at the moment with DeFi.

To get started with DeFi once their iPhone app is available you will just have to download it and give them your mobile # and email address and poof your in business.  This is a great opportunity for couples to talk to each other for hours at a time or companies with globally located employees to talk, all for free.  This is just a stepping stone for folks to then pay the $40/month and get flat rate unlimited calls to anybody on any network, anywhere in the world.  Maybe even disrupt the big telcos by lowering your minute plans with them.

One very interesting and important innovation by DeFi is that they are going to be giving out iNum numbers in the future.  This iNum is a very new concept giving people a # geared toward being used around the world and not being chained to a geographic location.

On a side note, Jeff is currently using a Nokia E51, E71 and iPhone.

Thank you to Jeff Rice for his time and Tim Warner for making this happen.

I was a guest on the T4 Show with Michael Manna on Friday.  He is a fun host for in interesting podcast.  If you want to  listen it’s episode 93 and here’s the url http://t4show.com.  Thanks for having me Michael.

I was interviewed yesterday by Jim Finkle from Reuters.  We talked about Mobile VOIP for a while and I was introduced to a new company called DeFi and I told Jim all about Truphone (one of my favorite services).  There’s an error in the pricing that I have already requested they correct.

I’m excited to be included in the story, Thanks Jim.

Here’s a link to the article in the Guardian Unlimited.  The first paper I saw to pick it up