About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

Happy New Year! Greetings from China.  I celebrated New Years in the air, leaving SFO at 12:13 pm on December 31, 2007, and arriving in Shanghai at 6:30 pm on January 1. I hope United counts the entire 6000 miles as flown on 12/31, because I still have 100% bonus miles from having Premier Executive status on United, which I am certainly going to lose for 2008!

I’m trying out a few services that will make it easier to stay connected while on the road. I would like to review them more fully after I get some experience using them this trip. There are two things I want to achieve: make it easy for US people to call my China mobile phone, and make it easy for me to call US people on my China mobile. This post reviews only the first–to make it easy for US callers to call my China mobile phone for cheap.

In summary:

• Use Skype if you want to provide one US area code “virtual” number to everyone and don’t mind paying $60 a year plus $0.021/minute. It takes a few steps to set up and cobbles together several Skype features to do this, namely: SkypeIn, SkypeOut, CallForwarding.
• Use Jajah or Jaxtr if your callers are trying to access you from the Web or social networks, or have a few callers that you can set up as “friends” in their system and train them to use the system. With Jajah, callers between US and China can call each other free from landline and mobile numbers. If one of the recipients is not a Jajah user, then it costs $0.033/minute. I can’t figure out how much it costs to use Jaxtr.
• Use eCallChina if your users are calling frequently from the same phone number, so you can set up pinless dialing for them. This is the cheapest option at $0.016/minute but they need to know how to dial your number from the US (e.g. 011-86-xxxxxxxxx) and they need to remember the local access number.

The Details

Here are 4 ways that I’ve tried to make it easy for US phone numbers to call a China mobile phone.

1. eCallChina pinless phone card

I set my office up with a pinless rechargeable phone card and linked the office phones to the phone card so people can dial a local access number (in our case, an area code 650 Mountain View number) and then dial the China number (with 011-86 preceding the full number including city code if applicable) without entering a PIN. So this is easy if you can remember the local access number and are a location where the pinless feature is already set up. We’ve used eCallChina’s rechargeable pinless card and it is the cheapest option here at $0.016 per minute, or 1250 minutes for $20. I then posted all this info on the Kango internal wiki.

2. SkypeIn number, combined by Skype Call Forwarding

For people who already have Skype, this could be the easiest way to allow your friends to access your China mobile phone. Rates to China are $0.02 per minute, and more rate info here. Skype doesn’t have a single feature that addresses this user scenario of “forwarding calls from a US number to a China mobile phone” so I had to cobble together a few features. Here’s the general steps:

1. set up an ordinary Skype account if you haven’t already
2. set up SkypeOut by purchasing SkypeCredit. From the Skype application. Select menu item Tools/SkypeOut. Then follow directions to purchase SkypeCredit. This allows you to call out from Skype to local numbers. This is very useful if you are on your computer already. Many times, people in China are not at their computer and I need to reach them on their mobile phone or landline. However, this feature alone allows you to call other people, not other people to call you.
3. set up SkypeIn. From the Skype application, select menu items Tools/SkypeIn. It will then direct you to a Sign up page on their poorly designed and difficult to navigate website. SkypeIn information can be found here. Current rate is $18 for 3 months, and $60 per year, unless you do it as part of a SkypePro premium account. Current rate for SkypePro is $3/month with a 60% discount on a SkypeIn number, which is about $36 per year. SkypeIn allows people to call from their phone to you on Skype, but not yet to your cell phone. (I just discovered another feature SkypeToGo which may address my need for a cheap calling solution from my China Mobile number to call the US. I’ll look at that later.)
4. enable Call Forwarding. Select menu item Tools/Call Forwarding. Be sure to type the full phone number including “+” sign and country code. For example, a China mobile might be something like “+8613555555555″ or something like that.

SkypeIn allows people to call your Skype account. Call Forwarding allows your Skype account to call your mobile when you don’t pick up on Skype. SkypeOut allows you to call other people, and also is the payment method that enables Call Forwarding. If you have any questions, just comment on this blog and I’ll try to answer it.

3. Set up Jajah

I signed up for Jajah. By visiting my personal URL at http://www.jajah.com/elliottng you will come to page which allows you to request a call to be set up between me and your phone in the US. I pay for the call. Here’s a badge so you can do it directly from this page. It is $0.033 per minute or free between Jajah users. Here’s the rate info.

4. Set up Jaxtr

I also signed up for Jaxtr. I’ve known Konstantin for a while and thought I’d try out his product too. Similarly, you can go to my personal URL at http://www.jaxtr.com/elliottng to initiate a call to me, or use the widget below.

Get jaxtr | Login

So I’ll put these in use and see how it works out. The key issue is making it easy for people in the US to adopt this technology. Giving my wife a bunch of URLs and asking her to go to her email to find the URL and then surf to a page to initiate a call, is less easy that giving her a phone number that she can just program into her cell phone memory. I think both Jajah and Jaxtr creates a “virtual” phone number that is tied to your mobile phone after you use the widget. But its not clear what that phone number is until after you make the first call. Both Jajah and Jaxtr would be well served to make it more clear that you are creating these “personal, virtual” phone numbers that can be used for calling me in the future without having to go back to your computer. Skype, on the other hand, doesn’t make it easy for me to set up a US access number for my China mobile phone, but once I have it set up, the biggest benefit is that there is one number that I can provide to everyone, without all the steps that people need to go through to call me using Jajah or Jaxtr.