Fring lays off 10, shows Skype's partnership with iSkoot pays
So Fring goes from 50 to 40 personnel. Big whoop. This is less a sign of trouble than of prudence. While the Fring layoff surprised Jan Geirnaert, Om Malik thinks it looks weak. It looks capital-conserving to me in light of the new economy.
Skype's clout matters in this space.
Fring and EQO and iSkoot all courted Skype executives for a partnership. Only iSkoot got the nod, which led to their becoming the software behind Skype's profitable 3 Skypephone and profitable relationships with carriers.
Skype and 3 solved iSkoot's need for distribution, capital for PSTN-Skype gateway operations, and traffic monetization. Fring must to leap those barriers on its own. Maybe you can help: Nominate Fring for the Crunchies 2008 award.
Fring's popular software lets you access many Skype features on your mobile phone, including Apple iPhones, Google Androids, and Nokia Symbian smartphones.
A Fring spokesperson wrote about Fring's 400% growth this last year, now at 400 thousand new accounts monthly:
The monthly increase is a result of a number of things - the continued viral growth in fringsters now active in over 220 territories globally, our phenomenally successful iPhone launch which took us to the Number 1 free AppStore download in markets worldwide within twelve hours of launch, a number of new product releases and handsets supported, and our overall business development effort which includes items such as the Mobilkom A1 deal.
tags: skype, fring, iskoot, layoffs, crunchies, iphone, android, google, apple, nokia, symbian
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Labels: Android, apple, business, competition, Fring, google, iPhone, iSkoot, mobile, skype
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2 Comments:
all that is interesting sideshow. important to note is that fring, iskoot also link to msn, yahoo and other IM.
skype made a crucial mistake (and could be heading into the direction of netscape) by not linking to other IM. with Gizmo, MSN and Yahoo I can currently cross-chat. With Skype I can only chat to Skypers. that is dumb. Plain and simply dumb. Why is skype not opening up to the world ? then maybe their fake numbers of 380 million users will one day be real... Hehhhe, maybe by linking to msn, yahoo and other IM they will simply says that now everybody is a skype user :) Muhahahahahahaha.
the only thing that links skype to the world is pstn and sms/cellphone gateways. but with my old nokia e70 in malaysia I cannot call via voip . skype or even skype out. and yet with gizmo5.com i could do this already like 2 years ago. skype is behind on this level. I could also do 3 years ago a sip/wifi based phone with this basic nokia e70.
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