T-Mobile USA wants to offer more than cell phone service. The company is getting into the voice over IP market with a new application that will allow people to make voice calls from Facebook.
T-Mobile USA today announced the Bobsled by T-Mobile service, which will offer voice calls via Facebook. This new application will provide Facebook’s more than 500 million users worldwide with free, one-touch calling to their Facebook friends from a personal computer and through the social platform’s chat window. It’s available now for download here.
In addition to making live voice calls across the globe, users will also be able to send voice messages to their friends either privately or via their ‘walls.’ The Bobsled application for Facebook is available today as a free download for all Facebook users and is not exclusive to T-Mobile customers. This captures a unique opportunity for the brand, as a recent survey found that 88% of Facebook users surveyed want voice chat capabilities within the site.*
“T-Mobile’s focus is to innovate to provide simple and affordable communications for customers, enabling people to stay connected wherever they are,” said Brad Duea, senior vice president, T-Mobile USA. “Bobsled by T-Mobile takes our communications services innovation to a whole new dimension, bringing simple and cost-effective connections to more than half a billion people overnight, allowing people on Facebook to more easily connect and giving voice to social networking. Our new Bobsled brand will evolve in the coming months to provide even more ways for people to connect, no matter what platform, device or mobile provider they are using.”
In the near future, T-Mobile plans to evolve Bobsled by T-Mobile to include video chat, the ability to place VoIP calls to mobile and landline U.S. numbers, and will offer applications on smartphones and tablets across various mobile platforms, regardless of the carrier that powers such devices.
The Facebook application for Bobsled by T-Mobile is powered by Vivox. To download the Bobsled application within Facebook, please visit: http://apps.facebook.com/bobsledbytmo
