Fring pings Skype off the leader board

Hazel Rycroft

ISRAELI Fring is bringing free video calls to mobile phones, offering wireless services similar to those of Skype. Fring is adding more than 500,000 users a month and allows them to call, message, and chat with each other over mobile phones. Set up three years ago, Fring also lets users see one another’s locations and integrate friend lists from other social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.

“We overlap with what Skype does, but our starting point is different,” said Chief Executive Officer Avi Shechter. Skype lets users call each other for free via the Internet. “We don’t even have a computer solution,” said Shechter, who previously headed ICQ, sold to AOL for $287 million in 1998. “We believe in mobile and that mobile is where the growth will be.”

Fring’s mobile instant messaging component is “a good example of how mobile instant messaging can successfully evolve,” researcher Gartner Inc. said in an October report. 

Fring is currently making money on advertising and plans to start add-on paid services soon, Shechter said. The company has also signed deals with Telefonica 02 Slovakia and Telekom Austria AG’s domestic wireless unit Mobilkom. Phone companies are seeking to make more money from data services such as mobile Internet as voice revenue falls.

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