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Rebtel appoints Souheil Badran to President and General Manager

MILWAUKEE and STOCKHOLM, Sweden, March 19, 2007 – Rebtel Inc. a leading provider of VoIP telephony, today announced the appointment of Souheil Badran as president and general manager for Americas and Asia Pacific.
“Increasingly more consumers are relying on Rebtel’s telephony services, but as these consumers proliferate, Rebtel’s scalability and affordability are making them more dependant on our services,” said Hjalmar Winbladh, chief executive officer and founder, Rebtel. “Souheil’s experience at a leading global company coupled with his in-depth understanding of the market will provide unlimited vision to Rebtel’s strategic development agenda and assist Rebtel in building the framework for the future of international calling.”

Souheil Badran brings a strong background and a global perspective to his position as president at Rebtel. Badran joined Rebtel from VeriSign, where he spent the last six years, and was most recently responsible for international operations including strategic development, product management, sales and marketing, and general business operations. In addition, Badran held responsibility for VeriSign’s global channel and partner teams. During his last two years at VeriSign, he was based in Geneva, Switzerland, VeriSign’s European headquarters.
Before joining VeriSign, Badran was with Digital Insight, an Internet banking provider that was recently acquired by Intuit. While there, he launched the Internet’s first cash management solution running in a service bureau environment. In this capacity, Badran was an integral part of the management team that positioned and drove Digital Insight through its successful initial public offering in October 1999. Prior to that, he also held various senior positions at Metavante Corporation in Milwaukee, Wis.
“Breaking down the cost barrier set by the larger carriers while leveraging the Internet is the cornerstone of the Rebtel vision,” said Badran. “I am extremely pleased to bring my experience to Rebtel as we continue to build the critical infrastructure for consumers globally.”

By: Ola Sundqvist, March 19th, 2007 Tags: hjalmar winbladh, rebtel, Souheil Badran

Polish People Worldwide Get Free International Mobile Calling

WARSAW, POLAND – December 11, 2006 – For the next three months, Polish people around the world can use their mobile phones to speak with loved ones abroad for nothing more than the cost of two local calls.

“Be smart Polania,” said Lukasz Wejchert, Onet president and CEO. “You can pay expensive charges to call Poland with your mobile phones, or you can be smart by joining the OnetRebtel revolution and use your mobile phones and the Internet to bypass the mobile operators. It’s your call.”

OnetRebtel, www.rebtel.onet.pl, is the result of a long-term strategic partnership announced in September between Grupa Onet.pl SA, owner of Poland’s leading Internet portal Onet.pl, and Rebtel Mobile, the world’s new mobile company for calling friends and family worldwide.

Instead of talking on their computer, or making expensive fixed line or mobile calls, OnetRebtel lets people use the most personal calling device – the mobile phone – to call friends and family abroad and each only pay for a local call. Two local calls with a free Internet connection in between.

And for the first three months OnetRebtel’s service is free. After that, it’s just 3 PLN ($1 USD) a week.

“Onet and Poland where chosen for our first partnership for a reason: there are more than 34.7 million mobile phones in Poland today and more than 14 million Polish people living and working abroad – most with mobile phones, and all want to keep in touch with home,” said Hjalmar Winbladh, Rebtel co-founder and CEO. “With OnetRebtel we make friends and family abroad no further away than a local call on a mobile phone.”

Added Wejchert, whose Onet.pl portal enjoys 9.7 million unique users per month, including 1.5 million from abroad: “OnetRebtel is unquestionably the cheapest and smartest way to make international mobile calls.”

By: Ola Sundqvist, December 11th, 2006 Tags: hjalmar winbladh, Lukasz Wejchert, onet, rebtel, Rebtel Partners

Free International Calls For The Holidays on Rebtel

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – December 11, 2006 – Happy holidays from Rebtel Mobile.

With Rebtel’s Call Home for the Holidays FREE program, everyone who starts using Rebtel between today and January 15, 2007 will get the first 30 days of service for free. No payments or contracts required to start calling. You pay for your local calls and Rebtel will connect them over the Internet free of charge for 30 days.

“You know you’re going to call friends and family abroad this holiday season – but this year you get a choice,” said Hjalmar Winbladh, Rebtel president and CEO. “You can pay expensive charges to make those calls with your mobile phone. Or, you can be smart and use your mobile phone and the Internet to bypass the mobile operators – any time; anywhere. So, why not? It’s your call.”

Instead of talking on your computer or landline, Rebtel lets you use your mobile phone to call your friends or family abroad and you each only pay for a local call – two local calls with a free Internet connection in between.

“Don’t pay international charges ever again,” said Winbladh. “For the holidays, give your loved ones local phone numbers where they live to call you, and get local numbers where you live to call them. Then Rebtel will connect your two local calls on the Internet for free.”

Normally Rebtel’s international calling services cost $1 USD per week for unlimited calling – but only for the weeks you use the service. And, no contracts are ever required.

“If you can make a local call on your mobile phone, you can get a free international connection today,” said Winbladh. “Without a doubt, Rebtel is the cheapest and smartest way to make mobile international calls.”

By: Ola Sundqvist, December 11th, 2006 Tags: hjalmar winbladh, rebtel, VoIP

Rebtel Dials Up $20 Million In Series A Funding

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – September 26, 2006 – Rebtel Networks AB, the new voice services company offering unlimited international calling from mobile phones for just $1 per week, today announced it has received $20 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures and Benchmark Capital. The funds will be used to advance Rebtel’s rapid growth, expand business development and marketing efforts, and accelerate expansion into more countries around the world.

Founded in January 2006 by Hjalmar Winbladh and Jonas Lindroth, Rebtel’s objective from the start has been to create a genuinely good, honest, and trustworthy global voice services company that saves its customers money.

The company’s services allow registered users to create local phone numbers for themselves and their friends abroad. For example, a person in San Francisco gets a San Francisco phone number to call their friend in London, and the friend in London gets a London phone number to call the person in San Francisco. By connecting the local calls over the Internet using VoIP technology, Rebtel lets consumers bypass the excessive international fees charged by mobile carriers.

Today, Rebtel services may be used by residents in more than 36 countries.

“We were impressed by the momentum that Rebtel has amassed since its Beta launched at the end of June,” said Danny Rimer, Index general partner who joins Rebtel’s board. “Now out of Beta, it is highly possible that Rebtel can create a sea change in the telecom market.”

Johan Brenner, Benchmark’s partner, who also joins Rebtel’s board, said the team at Rebtel is both revolutionary and visionary. “They’re clearly capable of building something that lasts; something that actually drives fundamental change in the telecom market,” he said.

Added Benchmark partner, Peter Fenton: “We instantly recognized the power of Rebtel to transform mobile communications to deliver consumers the freedom they have come to expect on the Internet. We are thrilled to help the team realize their vision to deliver a truly consumer-oriented voice services company.”

For Rebtel, the decision to accept outside investment was primarily about the people who will join the company as advisors and partners in the business, said Winbladh, who with Lindroth, co-founded Sendit AB in 1994, a pioneering mobile Internet software company they took public before it was acquired by Microsoft Corp. “For our market, we’re getting a dream team with investors like Index and Benchmark,” he said.

By: Ola Sundqvist, September 26th, 2006 Tags: benchmark capital, danny rimer, hjalmar winbladh, index ventures, johan brenner, peter fenton, rebtel

Onet and Rebtel to Provide Polish Users with Revolutionary Solution for Calling Abroad

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN and WARSAW, POLAND – September 19, 2006 – Rebtel Networks AB, the new way to call friends and family worldwide with a mobile phone for $1 per week, and Grupa Onet.pl SA, owner of Poland’s leading Internet portal, Onet.pl, today announced a long-term strategic partnership that will create an OnetRebtel Web site exclusively for the Polish market.
Today, Onet launched a special link to www.rebtel.com for users of the Onet.pl portal, enabling consumers in Poland, and the Polish community abroad to make unlimited international calls for just $1 per week plus a cost of the local connection.

“With millions of Polish people living all over the world, the OnetRebtel international calling offer is going to be amazing. We always strive to provide our customers with the best possible service at the best possible price – wherever they are! Rebtel is a great company with a strong vision for competitive communication, and we are pleased to have them as our partner,” said Lukasz Wejchert, Onet president and CEO. “I am convinced that together with Rebtel we will change the way Polish people stay in touch with their close ones abroad and with home when traveling or working outside of Poland.”

Said Rebtel Co-founder and CEO Hjalmar Winbladh: “Onet.pl is clearly the premier online venue for everything best about Poland. No one serves the Polish people at home and abroad better than Onet.pl, which makes our partnership a match made in heaven.”

The OnetRebtel offering will be supported with a significant multi-media advertising campaign.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

How Rebtel works
Rebtel gives people local phone numbers in their country to call their friends and family who live abroad.

By making all calls local, friends and family can call each other as often as they like and talk as long as they want at the cost of the local calls.

Using Rebtel costs $1 per week – but only for the weeks the service is used. If one week a customer does not make calls they are not charged for that week.

Getting started using Rebtel is very easy:
1. People sign up for a Rebtel account at rebtel.onet.pl.
2. They enter the mobile phone numbers for their friends or family who live abroad.
3. Local numbers are created and sent in a text messages (SMS) to their phones.

That means, for example, Rebtel gives someone living in Chicago a local Chicago phone number to call their friend in Warsaw; and Rebtel gives the person living in Warsaw a local Warsaw phone number to call their friend in Chicago.

REBin – Free global calls
When the person in Chicago calls their friend in Warsaw, they ask their friend – while they stay on the line – to hang up and call right back using the Warsaw phone number displayed on the screen of their phone (which is the same number they were sent in a text message).

When that happens:
The person in Chicago is making a local call in Chicago,
Their friend in Warsaw is making a local call in Warsaw,
Rebtel connects those two local calls over the Internet, and
The international minutes are free.
REBin calls (when the person who receives the call hangs up and calls back) can be made today between more than 36 countries around the world.

REBout – Cheap global calls
Customers can use Rebtel’s REBout service to call friends and family anywhere in the world.

They simply use their local number to call their global friend. But with REBout, there’s no hanging up or hanging on. They just stay on the line and talk. However, in addition to paying their carrier for the local call, the person making the call also has to pay Rebtel a tiny per-minute fee for the international minutes, which varies depending on the country being called.

About Onet
Grupa Onet (WSE: GRO) is the leading Polish new media group. Grupa Onet conducts its new media activities through Onet.pl (www.onet.pl), Poland’s leading Internet portal, and offers numerous other services of media and communications nature. Onet.pl is part of Poland’s leading media group, TVN Group (TVN S.A.; WSE: TVN), which apart from Onet, is active in television broadcasting and production.

Portal Onet.pl was founded in June 1996. Onet.pl is the biggest and most popular multimedia portal in Poland. Apart from revenues generated by various marketing services (advertising, e-commerce, search engine marketing), Onet.pl also profits from customer services (fees) such as, content services, e-mail and hosting services, auctions, classifieds and dating services, and telecommunication services. According to the latest available data from Megapanel PBI/Gemius (as of June 2006), 77.0% of Polish Internet users make use of Onet.pl each month, and in June 2006 they accounted for 9.7 million real users. On a monthly basis it records over 2.2 billion page views.

About Rebtel
Rebtel Networks AB is a new global voice services company for individuals, micro-business professionals, and cord-cutters inside small and large businesses, who regularly call friends, family or business colleagues abroad. Unlike the large mobile telecom carriers charging exorbitant rates to recoup their high costs, Rebtel offers ultra low rates for global calling by making all calls local. For more information, and to start using Rebtel services, go to www.rebtel.com or www.rebtel.onet.pl

By: Ola Sundqvist, September 19th, 2006 Tags: hjalmar winbladh, Lukasz Wejchert, onet, rebtel, Rebtel Partners, VoIP

EU Ministers: Don't waste time on telecoms' bad behavior

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – July 13, 2006 – Rebtel Networks AB is calling for European Union (EU) ministers to abandon efforts to get mobile telecom carriers to slash roaming charges. Instead, Rebtel recommends EU ministers encourage constituents to buy local pre-paid SIM cards when abroad, and use Rebtel’s REBin service to make unlimited international calls for a $1 USD-per-week service fee, charged only in weeks when calls are made.

“Rebtel was designed for making super low-cost international calls from where you live – however, with pre-paid SIM cards you can use Rebtel to solve the roaming problem, too,” said Hjalmar Winbladh, Rebtel’s president and CEO.

To get started, people sign up for a Rebtel account at www.rebtel.com, where they enter their mobile phone number (or SIM card number), and the mobile phone numbers of friends abroad. Rebtel then instantly creates pairs of local numbers and sends them in text messages so they can be saved in the friends’ phone address books and used to call each other from then on.

For example, a person from Paris visiting London, who has purchased a pre-paid SIM card, gets a local London number for calling a friend in Paris, and their friend back home in Paris gets a local Paris number for reaching them while in London.

Once set up, Rebtel charges $1 USD per week (only in weeks calls are made) for use of two services: REBin and REBout.

With REBout, people use local numbers to call anywhere in the world and only pay for the local call, plus a small per-minute fee to Rebtel.

But for those who think that’s too expensive Rebtel offers REBin, where the user’s local call is connected with their global friend’s local call in a virtual room on the Internet, called a REBroom. In a REBroom, all international minutes are free.

To get to a REBroom, the person who receives the call hangs up and calls back on the local number they’ve been given for their friend, while the caller stays on the line.

With REBin, no matter how many calls, how often or how long, there are no additional charges over Rebtel’s service fee and the cost of the local calls.
For more information go to www.rebtel.com

By: Ola Sundqvist, July 13th, 2006 Tags: hjalmar winbladh, rebtel, VoIP

Rebtel Offers Unlimited International Calling on Mobile Phones for as Little as $1 USD per Week

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – June 27, 2006 – Rebtel Networks AB, a new mobile telecommunications services company, today announced that people around the world can now start using its services for making ultra low-cost international calls on their mobile phones.

“If you can make a local call on your mobile phone, you can be rebbing within minutes for free,” said Hjalmar Winbladh, Rebtel’s president and CEO.

How Rebtel Works

To get started, people sign up for a Rebtel account at www.rebtel.com, where they enter their mobile phone number and the mobile phone numbers of global friends. Rebtel then instantly creates pairs of local numbers and sends them in text messages (sms) so they can be saved in the friends’ phone address books and used to call each other from then on.

For example, a person in San Francisco gets a local San Francisco number for calling a friend in London, and their friend in London gets a local London number for reaching them in San Francisco. The local calls are connected using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology.

Once set up, Rebtel charges $1 USD per week for use of two services: REBin and REBout.

With REBout, people use local numbers where they live to call anywhere in the world and only pay for the local call, plus a small per-minute fee to Rebtel.

Hang up, Hang on, Hang out

But for those who think that’s too expensive Rebtel offers a new and even cheaper service called REBin, where the user’s local call is connected with their global friend’s local call in a virtual room on the Internet, called a REBroom.

By: Ola Sundqvist, June 17th, 2006 Tags: hjalmar winbladh, rebtel, VoIP

Rebtel Takes Phony Out of Mobile Telephony

INNOVATE!EUROPE, ZARAGOZA, SPAIN – May 17, 2006 - Rebtel Networks AB, a new mobile telecommunications services company, www.rebtel.com, today announced it will offer new ways to call friends, family and work colleagues around the world for a fraction of the cost charged by the leading mobile telecom carriers today.

When the service is available in June, mobile phone users in 40 countries will be able to stop calling expensive international numbers and instead create and use standard local numbers for those calls.

“Outrageous pricing for international mobile phone calls will soon be a thing of the past,” said Hjalmar Winbladh, president and CEO of Rebtel. “For $1 USD per week – less than what many people spend daily on coffee – we can give you local numbers for your friends abroad. For example, I’ll give my friend in San Francisco a San Francisco number to call me, and I’ll get a Stockholm number for him that I will use. Then all our mobile calls will be at our normal local rates.”

Officially unveiled today, Stockholm-based Rebtel is in the final stages of testing its network.

How Rebtel works

To get started, consumers will go to www.rebtel.com, and sign up for a Rebtel account. Once logged in, they enter their mobile phone number and the mobile phone number of a global friend, and Rebtel will instantly create a pair of local numbers they can use to call each other from then on.

Once set up, Rebtel will charge consumers $1 USD per week to access two new services, called REBin and REBout, for unlimited talking to all of their friends abroad when calling a local number.

Using REBout, consumers will be able to call anyone in the world using a local number and only pay their carrier for the local call, plus a small per-minute fee to Rebtel to cover the interconnect charges for the international part of the call. The REBout charge for a call to the U.S., for instance, will be as low as 2 cents per minute.

Hang up, hang on, hang out

But for those who think that’s too expensive Rebtel offers a new and different service called REBin, where users’ local calls are connected with their global friends’ local calls in a virtual room on the Internet, called a REBroom.

In the REBroom all calls are free – no matter how many, how often or how long. No additional charges over the $1 USD per week fee and the cost of the local calls that most consumers have already paid for with their mobile carrier.

To get to the REBroom, when friends phone, instead of answering, the user simply hangs up, and while the friend hangs on, the user calls the friend’s local number. The two calls are then automatically connected, and the friends can hang out and talk for as long as they like, and not worry about the cost.

With Rebtel, consumers can use the mobile phones they own today, and don’t have to buy anything else, download software, get a new SIM card, use a headset connected to a computer, or worry about confusing additional charges.

Consumers need to sign up to create local numbers, but to call a local number created by a Rebtel user, no sign-up is necessary. And, users will only be charged Rebtel’s $1 USD per week service fee if they actually make calls. If no calls are made during a week there are no charges.

“If you can make a local call on your mobile phone, you can be rebbing within minutes for free,” said Winbladh. “It’s super easy.”

Terms and conditions

To register, consumers use a credit card or PayPal account for an initial $5 USD or $10 USD charge. An auto top-up function will be available in increments of $10 USD or $20 USD when the balance falls below $2 USD.

If users are not pleased in the first 30 days, Rebtel will refund their initial fees in full. After that, users may cancel at any time, and any remaining funds in their account may be used until empty.

“People are sick of mobile carriers’ fine print, lock-ups, hidden charges, and crazy-high rates for making international calls,” said Winbladh, who co-founded Sendit AB in 1994, a pioneering mobile Internet software company he took public before it was acquired by Microsoft Corp. “It may sound silly and naive, but we’re committed to using the latest Internet technology for international calling today and for local calls and roaming services tomorrow, and pushing the cost and convenience benefits back to our users.”

By: Ola Sundqvist, May 17th, 2006 Tags: hjalmar winbladh, innovate, rebtel, VoIP