The idea, which was thought up in the dorm of M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology in Bangalore, was launched as a service last Saturday. Still in beta, or testing phase, nearly four lakh FreeKalls have been made so far.
"The response has been phenomenal. Our servers crashed about seven times and we had to bring it back up," said Yashas Shekar, a 23-year-old who cofounded the company with college-mates Vijayakumar Umaluti and Sandesh Eshwarappa. "On the flip side Sandesh, and Vijayakumar have not slept since Saturday," chuckled Shekar, a former Godrej Interio employee who shut his first venture, a web development firm, to concentrate on this startup.
The service, in some ways, is reminiscent of the trunk calls of the last century, except that the cloud infrastructure does the job instead of an operator. To make a FreeKall a user dials number 080-67683693 and the call is disconnected after just one ring. Following this, the system calls back the user, and an automated system prompts the user to dial the desired number. Lo and behold, the call is connected. The system can currently support 10,000 requests per second. If it goes beyond that, it will not be returned.
"I must say, someone has thought out of the box. This can be truly disruptive if it works out well," said Hemant Joshi, who oversees the telecom practice at consulting firm Deloitte.
FreeKall makes money by making people listen to advertisements. So, when the call is connected, the user hears an advertisement instead of a ringing tone. And at intervals of two minutes, the caller and the called party will have to pause the conversation and hear an advertisement for soaps, shampoos and the like.
For now, unregistered users can make calls that last three minutes. For those who register, the conversations can last 12 minutes. In about a month, there will be no limit on the amount of time a person can FreeKall. International calls will be possible in about a month, once legal clearances are obtained.
The company is aiming for 10 million calls a day in India and expects revenue of $30 million ( 185 crore) by the end of the next fiscal. It plans to take its business to Africa soon.
