The latest innovation

A novel comms app called Speakfree seeks to make phone-to-phone communication easy, on an Indiawide basis. The  app aims to let users call any phone number anywhere in India, without requiring an internet connection.

What is Speakfree?

The mobile app is being spearheaded by a Kochi-based group of techies named Sumbav Communications. The Android app will be available for download from the 1^st week of 2016. The app requires downloading only at the caller end, and afterwards, the use of the Internet is not required anymore, according to Sabu T Raghavan, CEO. The call duration is expected to be confined to 3 minutes, but an unlimited number of 3-minute calls can be made. This easy-to-use low-cost tech will carry innumerable benefits of lakhs of Indians for whom smartphone penetration has become a possibility, but may often find it hard to access the Internet in order to make the most of their services. This will especially aid those who have to resort to making emergency calls, and the India-wide nature of the service results in very few constraints being imposed. This is because the service makes use of the existing telecom network.

Future prospects

According to Mohamed Nazeem P., 1 lakh downloads are targeted in the first phase.  In the initial stages, the service will be available only to Keralites. But given its immense potential, Sumbav Communications is confident that they will be able to raise significant amounts of funding quickly. The raised funding will then be used to expand to other states, with Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Gujarat, Mumbai and Delhi being the main targets of expansion. One hopes that the Kalamessery-based company’s novel app fulfills its promise.