Mobile News South Africa

A ‘fringing' world first for mobile

Johannesburg - fring this week became the world's first mobile VoIP application to be made publicly available for the iconic apple iPhone, enabling users to talk, chat and interact with other fring users (“fringsters”) and all of their online communities, using their iPhone's WiFi connection.

A preview R&D version of the popular mobile VoIP application, developed in conjunction with the Holon Institute of Technology academic research labs in Israel, is now available for use on the iPhone from www.fring.com. The pre-release version is designed to both answer demand from iPhone-owning would-be fringsters and at the same time enable fring to learn about user experience, benefit from early feedback and influence the R&D process of the full release version, due for launch later this year.

During login, fring automatically creates a single, integrated contact list, combining contacts from all of the users' selected internet communities. And because fring is an always-on, always-connected application, it offers special features such as real-time, PC-style “presence” indicators which continually display whether contacts are online, away, offline, in a call, on their mobiles or in front of their PCs, providing new levels of freedom to interact and truly take the internet mobile.

fring was launched in February 2007, and since January 2008 has been experiencing growth in excess of 100 000 new fringsters per month across more than 180 countries worldwide. fring's aim is to spread its philosophy of fringing freedom to as many mobile phone users as possible and its launch of the iPhone application, is yet another important step in this direction.

  • About fring: fring is a mobile internet community and service that enables its users to talk, chat and interact with other fringsters and their internet communities from their mobile phones. fring users are able to communicate with each other and with contacts from Skype, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, Twitter, Yahoo! & AIM. fring was “soft-launched” in February 2007 and already enjoys users worldwide in over 180 different countries.

  • Let's do Biz