Cheap-and-Chic VoIP

File this under full-blown cultural phenomenon: cheap is cool. No, wait. Cheap is hot. OK, it’s cool like ice and hot like Padma Lakshmi in a mini-dress.

Remember when cheap wasn’t cool? When cheap went hand-in-hand with Lady Stetson perfume at CVS, calling cell fraud and post-Wal-Mart-purchase guilt-fueled binge drinking episodes?

Er, maybe that last one was just me.

Point is, cheap used to be for losers and those people that ride motorized scooters around Sam’s Club out of sheer laziness. Consider the “shabby chic” movement. Say you buy a moth-eaten yet Seventies-tastic sofa at a vintage furniture store for $500. This is way hip. If you pick the same sofa up at a garage sale down the street for a fraction of that? Ewwww. Who knows what that thing has been through, if you know what I mean.

But now that’s all changing as the economy’s invisible hand moves some interesting chess pieces around. As evidenced by the staggering fact that the new Taco Bell that just opened here in my town of Northampton, Mass., is the hottest dinner ticket in town. We’re talking lines out the door, drive-through queues that stretch down the street snarling traffic, and 45-minute waits for your enchirito. The opening — granted, it’s the first “green” Taco Bell, built from sustainable materials and run on solar power, and it kind of looks like a Starbucks, aesthetically speaking — has generated breathless Facebook entries and even a glowing column in the local paper. Taco Bell has gotten itself some cache.

That kind of thing is trickling into the communications space as well and I think there could be some beneficiaries here. And there is no more glaring of a candidate for a cheap-and-chic makeover than VoIP.

VoIP is, as we all know, cheap-o-licious. And that’s been its main selling point as a standalone service. But it’s never been sexy, hot, cool, hip — except among Skype technologist types (and you know who you are). Until now.

Despite thebusiness model issues going on with mobile VoIP, Truphone is leveraging the hallowed name of iPhone to get a leg up. This week it supercharged its free VoIP app for the hip device by enabling VoIP calls to run over the cellular network rather than a Wi-Fi connection, and adding free iPhone-to-iPhone calling with presence integration so users can see who else in their address book has Truphone up and running. Is this cool? Well, yes. The idea is to give iPhone users a way to make international calls without paying a dollar per minute. This international toll bypass gig used to be the relatively dry province of corporate business travelers and the immigrant population calling relatives back home. But no more! The implication is that you’re an iPhone user. You’re probably relatively with it. And so, natch, you’re friends with beaucoup Europeans and travel abroad a lot. You’re hip like that.

In a similar-yet-different vein, Truphone strikes again with a free application that turns the iPod Touch into a phone. All you need is a Wi-Fi connection for VoIP calling to other iPod Touch owners, users of Google Talk messaging, and customers of Truphone's bring-your-own-access service. The news sparked a collective bout of high-fiiiiiving among a certain demographic, despite the requirement for a potentially coolness-killing headphone and microphone. No calling to or from landlines either, but landlines are for the tragically unhip, anyway. Amirite? Aw, snap.

Then there’s the new Unison free unified communications software that was launched this week. The download is aimed at business users but includes sponsored ads. I remember using a sponsored version of e-mail a long time ago at a workplace that featured an unclose-able and ultimately annoying box that fed ads for everything from cat food to dental services. It made me feel second-string, to be honest. I know that’s shallow, and maybe even class-obsessed, but really, can’t the company shell out for proper business e-mail? I remember thinking, “it’s so embarrassing.”

Now? I’ve been reading some postings on the Unison launch and the conventional wisdom is shaping up to be something like this: Unison is simply bringing the consumer Web world into business. No big! Like the iPhone (there it is again), it just represents the consumerfication of the enterprise, also represented by admittedly hot communications trends like social networking and voice mash-ups.

OK, let’s nutshell this thing. So VoIP is getting cheap and chic these days. Now then, can we build a business model around that? Or is it just a nice bit of image-spinning fluff?

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines