Recently, we just help the operator of the upcoming Unwired Conference to setup a Hoiio Online Number. This temporary number enables him to keep his personal mobile number secret and yet still receive calls on his mobile phone through call forwarding. In addition, he is able to blacklist any spam callers so that they will never disturb him again. Pretty neat way of using the Hoiio Number.

Check out this link to see the Hoiio Number in action. Cheers.

• http://unwired.com.sg/sign-up-2/

Hence, when we recently won the DEMO Asia 2012 People’s Choice Award and collected our US$20,000 scholarships for the Plug And Play International Acceleration Program, it seems like a dream came true. And in early April, we flew 13,642 km to San Francisco and drove 68 minutes to our new Sunnyvale office at Plug And Play Tech Center.

http://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/

And we met some pretty cool people. The most interesting guy we met and heard from is Mr. Saeed Amidi. Here is the guy who incubated Google, Logitech and PayPal. And he is also currently an investor in many hot start-ups (e.g. Dropbox) in Silicon Valley.

Through Plug And Play International Acceleration Program, we have officially launched Hoiio API for USA. Cheers =)

For more information on Hoiio API, please check out the links below:

• Hoiio API launches in USA
• Hoiio API showcase in Demo Spring 2012

Our story in Silicon Valley is only starting. Come see us in June Plug And Play Expo and see our progress over the 3 months Plug And Play Acceleration Program. Cheers.

Cast your vote before 10th October, and help us be among the top 50 apps! Simply go to asiatop50apps.com, and like or +1 for Hoiio.

If you have both Facebook and Google+ accounts, do both and give us your two votes. Woohoo!

For your convenience, you can just click “like” below :)

Textuate.com is a SMS broadcast and marketing app in the cloud that Hoiio users can access and use with their Hoiio credits. This is a cool app with advanced functions such as personalized messages, scheduler, delivery reports and more.

Simple, pay per use and no gimmick. Click here and Enjoy =)

About SmartLoans.sg & Catapult Ventures
SmartLoans.sg was built and developed by Catapult Ventures Pte Ltd – an Internet company based in Singapore that combines the sound business acumen, strong technical expertise and keen consumer financial knowledge of passionate and driven founders whom have dedicated their time to run the next generation of web applications.

About Hoiio Connect Program (Beta)
Hoiio Connect Program is a revenue sharing and developer partnership program that aims to engage developers working on Hoiio Open API to join us in co-creation of advanced communication services for everyone. More apps with partners are currently in the pipeline. (e.g. IVR, Fax, Conference and more) Whatever you can dream of in communication, we can create. Cheers =)

Today, my grandma got a bill shock and I got a bitter taste in my mouth.

One of my cousin (my grandma’s favorite) is now based in Australia. My grandma started to miss him and began calling him from her old tradition candy bar phone everyday.

Being illiterate, my grandma only know how to dial a number saved in her phonebook. Hence, after hours of calling, she now got the first bill shock of her life.

Imagine how a thrifty old lady will react after getting a bill that is 50% her monthly living expenses.

Ouch ! Ouch ! Ouch !

Being a geek working on Voice over IP technologies over the last 10 years of my life, I felt bitter that years of technology advancements in Hoiio and Skype have not been able to help my grandma.

Note to self: I must create something more simple for my grandma to use. Something that will help connect all the grandparents to their jet-setting grandchildren seamlessly.

For the first time ever, most of the new Hoiio users are based in Middle East and is using Hoiio Chat for FREE mobile messaging to add simple convenience to their daily lives.

In this, I have learned an interesting (and very late) lesson on the concept of FREE.

With our first taste of FREE-dom, we are now working on something FREE and hopefully much BIGGER for our Hoiio users. Stay tuned =)

PS: If any of our beloved users guessed correctly on what we are building on, I have prepared a personal gift for him/her. Feel free to make your best guess on our facebook & twitter. Cheers.

New App for the New Year ^_^ Cheers to all

• Email us at support@hoiio.com
• Look for us on FaceBook
• Tweet to us @HoiioTweets

To better illustrate our commitment to quality, we have started a pilot program on publishing our call quality reports to the following 17 key countries. Let us know if this is a good idea and we will work on expanding this program. We hope to start publishing our call quality reports on a monthly basis. Thanks for your support.

Any comments or advice? Do talk to us as we are always keen to hear from you for new ideas to better serve you =)

Average Call Duration is the average talk time of all the successful calls. As we all probably know, long conversations are only feasible with good call quality. Hence, the Average Call Duration statistics is an indication of our call quality performance.

Call Success Rate illustrates the percentage of successful call connections over total calls initiated by users. A call connection is defined successful once Hoiio establishes link to the calling destinations with either a ringing or engaged tone. The Call Success Rate statistics is an indication of our coverage performance.

Indeed. Entrepreneurs’ lives are never dull. It’s full of twists and turns as we pursue our ultimate dream of achieving a highly scalable and profitable business model.

Thinking about Hoiio tonight, many emotions are starting to run through me. Perhaps, this is a night to share them.

• Firstly, I am happy. After nearly 18 months of operating only in Singapore, we will be finally launching globally. Hoiio will now be available in 137 countries, supporting multiple languages and currencies.
• Next, I am feeling optimistic and yet jittery. Will the market understand and buy my dream for Hoiio?
• Lastly, I really felt like kicking myself. What took me so long to decide on a global launch?

Well. Let’s look ahead. My views of the telecom industry and my dreams of Hoiio are in the slides below. As a reader for this blog, a voter in the democratic free market that is known as the world wide web, please do feel free to comment. Thanks in advance.