Locally developed mobile application, ttrumpet, is ready to make its consumer debut next month.
Grant Theis, co-founder of ttrumpet, explains the start-up is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fastcomm, a South African tech company. The app was mainly built in SA but, also used various developers and technologies from other countries. It has been designed to enable free calls and messaging worldwide.
"Ttrumpet is not simply an app. It is a platform that serves merchants, brands and retailers. The platform allows these entities to market themselves into the app through vouchers, m-commerce, location-based search, image recognition, Augmented Reality, iBeacons etc. The app, therefore, embraces many technologies that allow consumers to 'discover' what places, brands and businesses can do for them," Theis says.
"We did a soft launch to the IT industry in May with the objective of getting a few thousand beta users (under 5 000) during the four-month period - which we achieved," he explains.
The idea behind the beta launch was to test the service and allow time to really bed down the news features that were in development and tweak and change the platform and user-interface based on feedback received from beta users, Theis adds.
"Our new messaging features are now available and, as such, we are pushing these into the market as we have started to see traction from our users; so officially ttrumpet is now available, however, our big consumer launch and marketing outreach will officially be in November."
Theis also points out at a communication layer, ttrumpet goes further up the value chain in SA than any other over the top (OTT) service.
Ttrumpet has direct interconnect arrangements and not only sells voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) calls, but GSM airtime through the app as well (to be used when the user is out of data coverage), he notes.
The app is also currently in the process of providing mobile data services, WiFi and international data roaming services using ttrumpet credits as a universal communications wallet.
This is possible because ttrumpet and its sister company, Connection Telecom, already terminate a lot of VOIP traffic in SA and have an electronic communication network service licence, he says.
"Our rates in SA are R0.65 to mobile devices and R0.40 to landlines. When we say we are up to 70% cheaper, we are referring to various international destinations such as the US or Syria, for example, where we have very competitive rates compared to other operators," Theis says.
He notes that, according to Juniper Research, mobile instant messaging is rapidly growing and by 2016 it is expected to triple in use and by 2018 account for 75% of the traffic or 63 trillion messages.
"There is no denying chat has taken the world by storm - and as more platforms and more options become available - isn't it time we re-think how we are chatting?" asks Theis. "Ttrumpet Chat is less voyeuristic and more private - and today we are proud to expand this with three distinct ways of chatting - private chat, scheduled chat and Uber Priv'e."
Ttrumpet is available in the Apple App Store and on Google Play.
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