LONDON–Jan. 21, 2009—Truphone today announced the immediate free availability of its Truphone Anywhere application for Android™-enabled mobile handsets, including the recently released G1 phone. The application is available now as a download on the Android Market in the U.K. and the U.S.

To coincide with T-Mobile’s announcement earlier this week of the availability of the G1 mobile phone in March 2009, a German version of Truphone Anywhere for Android is available and will be the first native language multi-communications application in the Android Market in Germany and Austria when it launches at CeBIT 2009.

Truphone Anywhere for Android delivers an all-in-one conversations hub that allows customers to take advantage of Truphone’s low international call rates, in addition to the cost of a local call*.

As well as being able to make low-cost international voice calls, Truphone customers can also easily instant-message their friends across a variety of networks including MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk™ and Twitter from within one Android application. Customers can also call friends anywhere in the world on Google Talk for the price of a local call, and similarly will soon will be able to instant-message and call their friends on Skype.

“We want to make it as easy as possible for people to have conversations with their communities around the world in whatever form they choose,” said Truphone CEO Geraldine Wilson.

She continued: “We passionately believe in devices like the Android and iPhone which offer easy user access to applications through the Android Market and the App Store in Apple’s iTunes. The G1 and the entire Android platform is an obvious and important distribution channel for us.”

Truphone is now available on Android, the Apple iPhone, the Apple iPod touch, Blackberry and Nokia devices.

January 6^th 2009 – London and San Francisco: Truphone today debuted the ability to make and receive Skype™ calls and instant messaging (IM) to the entire Skype user base on its iPhone and iPod touch applications. The service is scheduled to be available to all customers during the week of 12^th January 2009.

The introduction was made at Showstoppers on the eve of MacWorld and will be showcased on the Truphone stand (#3228) at MacWorld for the remainder of the week.

This represents one more step towards making Truphone the open ‘all in one conversations hub’ for iPhone and iPod touch users.

Truphone customers on both Apple devices can now reach their Skype friends on their Skype ID. This further expands the universe of people with whom Truphone customers can stay in touch. This is in addition to the series of Instant Messaging services also announced today.

“The introduction of Skype calling and instant messaging represents yet another breakthrough for Truphone,” said Geraldine Wilson, Truphone CEO. “What this means for Truphone’s customers, is that they can now call or message all their Skype friends using their iPhone or iPod touch. This allows iPhone and iPod touch users to have a choice in how they stay in touch with friends and colleagues around the world all within the one application.”

Truphone to Skype communications are free over the Internet and iPhone users can also place and receive Skype calls and messages when not in a Wi-Fi accessible location, for the cost of a local call*, using the Truphone Anywhere feature.

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January 6^th 2009 – London and San Francisco: Truphone today introduced full two way Instant Messaging over MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk on the iPod touch and also announced availability on the iPhone week commencing 12^th January 2009.

Customers can also make and receive voice calls on Google Talk and calling functionality will be added to MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger in the coming weeks.

Truphone has also integrated Twitter into the TruFriends view so you can see what your friends are talking about and post from within the Truphone application.

“We understand that customers increasingly want more integrated communications and like to switch between chat and voice. With these new features, Truphone customers can now choose which mode of communications they want to use according to the moment all from within the one application.” said Truphone CEO Geraldine Wilson. “This represents another step towards making Truphone the open ‘all in one conversations hub’ for iPhone and iPod touch users.”

The introduction was made at Showstoppers on the eve of Macworld and will be showcased in the Truphone booth (#3228) at MacWorld for the remainder of the week. This is in addition to the introduction of Skype calling and Instant Messaging also announced today.

Customers of Truphone for both the iPhone and iPod touch can now very simply import all their contacts from these accounts to Truphone and chat with them from the Truphone interface. The Truphone client on both devices shows who is ‘online’ with its built-in presence functionality.

Instant Messages are always free of charge to send and receive when in Wi-Fi. iPhone users can also Instant Message when out of Wi-Fi and data charges will be covered in the customers unlimited data package*. Truphone will also add the same functionality to other leading Instant Messaging services throughout the year.

Why only Twitter and maybe facebook can challenge Google!

Since quite some time I am wondering if the global giant in Internet Lead Generation Google is going to remain the only game in town for the foreseeable future.

In general I doubt it, as any industry in the long term has seen a three way split of the overall pie. Why is such a sharing of the overall marketplace so important for the evolution of the technology market space? Most of recent innovation on the web has been build around the advertisement driven industry enabled by Google. Ingredients of this drive between 2003 and 2008 have been quick setup and monetization, once an audience of size has been established.

Only now it is emerging that new online giants like facebook with very high daily re-login rates have a chance to change the status quo. Also facebook is still in need to find an appropriate business model, which cannot be the adaption of Google Search being build into Social Networks, as mySpace has shown in 2007.

Yes, I do agree the Social Networks have seen tremendous growth, but demanding sky-high double-digit multi billon dollar valuation will need more than just subscriber growth. It will need a monetization engine independent of Google and something much better than banners in smaller formats beside the website. This is where I like to start looking at what I call the Lead Generation Marketplace on the WWW.

While traditional media has been dominated by traditional advertising formats for as long as I can see, in the first 10 years of the Web we have seen a direct translation of such traditional advertisement formats into online via banners. The dominant player had been Yahoo with its massive audiences which are now reclining and only remain loyal on the mailing platform.

Lead generation as pioneered by Goto.com later called Overture and eventually taken to global dominance by Google is ultimately a new industry in a new technological enabled Internet based world. It is an industry, which is destroying the traditional advertising industry and therefore the established players unless they are able to change. The recession will most likely show that most publishers will never regain the same power base and advertiser base and most titles struck today from the lists, which have emerged in a last blip post the dot com bubble will never re-emerge. The reason is that we have entered a stage where lead generation will be king and traditional publishers understand very little, what this is, how to participate in it and how to turn the businesses around into a direction of survival in a lead generation driven world.

In the past 8 years while google with his simple advertisement format AdWords (three liners, 45 characters, followed by 160 characters), has grown from just $100m in revenue to having accumulated a cash pile of $14.4bn on its balance sheet within a very short period. It remains the only dominant if not monopolistic player in lead generation.

In this analysis I in particular do not differentiate between the per thousand advertising formats (CPM), the per click model (CPC, cost per click) mostly favored by google which makes a near 99 percent part of the Google income stream or the click per action (CPA), which we traditionally call lead generation. All three models, CPM, CPC and CPA are lead generation if monetized on a performance base. Clearly google has favored to stay away from a total performance based model as generated leads can convert with different efficiency independent of Google’s or others influence. Google is driven mainly by CTR, click Through Rate for this reason to maximize revenue and profit for its on sake.

However it is clear that different leads have different values. A lead generated from a Search is different to a lead generated by a performance and behavioral banner or any new ad formats called AdImages™, which one of our portfolio companies Pixsta is proposing. AdImages are very attribute-rich product pictures placed contextually into the right location at the right time, so the user can interact with them. However the underlying lead is all the same, only a global dominating standard can generate substantial cash for shareholders. Most startups do not understand that ultimately only an establishment of a lead generating standard can generate substantial income. Readers will now argue that MoneySuperMarket or Affiliate Networks and many other companies have shown otherwise. But I argue they have not, as they all have remained minor players on the sideline of a giant.

However what is clear is that different leads have different engagement matrices and values. The industry has shown very little differentiation between the leads generated to them. We have seen some differentiation but not to the level we could break down utilizing existing technologies.

Every owner of a product or service based website has seen such a matrix if he observes the visitors not just by CTR or conversion rates but ultimately how engaged users are with the website and in particular the product displayed. Higher engagement must lead to a higher potential visit to purchase ratio.

Now massive lead generation potential resides not only within today’s comparison shopping engines of the like of shopzilla, ciao or ebay’s owned shopping.com or the newcomers like Pixsta, like.com, theFind, become.com, twenga or myDeco, but equally in the social networks and short message platforms like twitter. Most likely two of them, facebook and twitter, have the greatest potential of all as they start to engage very targeted and large audiences.

If I would vote I would believe twitter, which is still relatively small and only known in the tech world, has the greatest potential to emerge as a new Giant in Lead Generation.

Why? Any timely interaction, location based, text readable and so simple in the form of 140 characters is ultimately powerful and what we have been waiting for such a long time. We have engaged in billions of these communications since SMS emerged about 15 years ago. But what is the same but ultimately different is an interconnected and networked IP driven 140 character string via twitter. The similarity of twitter strings and Google AdWords and SMS are obvious, but only emerge when put into this context of lead generation.

However it remains today’s dominant platform, the mobile phone followed by the laptop / PC as the perfect most powerful consumer device for such casual communications. Behind is the unlimited potential to generate a massive global lead generation engine. This has a potential to emerge as yet the most powerful lead generation engine we have seen, many times more powerful than google.

But going back to the more traditional lead generation, it is obvious that the web is yet in its early developments for product based lead generation. If you analyze the space numerous companies are fighting in comparison shopping for a meaningful position. Nobody so far has been able to achieve a substantial market share and brand loyalty like Google . All of them are purely driven by short term and are totally dependent on google’s search engine optimized traffic. The model is get in quick, build it quick and sell it as long as it lasts. Hopefully before Google regulates your traffic to the level where they believe it belongs. Mostly in the negligible 2 – 5% market share so no one is able to build an equivalent ad standard like AdWords into a challenger.

So far facebook or twitter have not been able to innovate in this field either and I doubt they can. The organizations of such companies are not able to innovate beyond the core DNA of the founders gene which are around functional drive for the existing social communication enabling platform.

Therefore companies with innovative ideas like our portfolio company PIXSTA, which is establishing the AdImage™ standard will play an important role as an engine of monetization in a world in which lead generation will emerge in a three way split between giants like Google, Facebook and hopefully the soon largest player called Twitter.

Update: Today both, JP Morgan’s Imran Khan and Barclays Capital’s Doug Anmuth have put the rising importance of performance based advertising on their respective lists for tech predictions for 2009, as noted by TechCrunch.