Tel-Aviv based fring announced that they are releasing their API, allowing third-party developers the opportunity to develop new applications called fring Add-ons for the fring community. fring offers peer to peer mobile VOIP and allows users to chat, call, and transfer files from mobile to PC or mobile to mobile, completely free of charge, using the mobile devices’ Wi-Fi connection. The company has a strong managerial team led by Avi Shechter, Co-founder and CEO of fring, who was also the CEO of ICQ in its early days.

In our conversation, Roy Timor-Rousso, fring’s Product Marketing VP pointed out that currently the company is not focusing on earning revenue, but rather on building the fring community and brand. According to fring, they have experienced phenomenal growth since their launch in January 2007 with users in more than 200 countries, growing at more than 100,000 new users each month. fring is available on more than 600 mobile phones and devices, such as Symbian Series 60, Sony Ericsson UIQ, Windows Mobile 5 & 6 and the iPhone. In the past, users complained of a few problems such as a bug causing the deletion of SMS’s, however, Timor-Rousso affirmed that all these bugs had been fixed in the latest version, which came out in late May.fring is currently integrated with Skype, AIM, Twitter, Google Talk, SIP and more, and is working on a Facebook application The-New-Faces-at-Facebook that will be coming out soon. Of course, this will all change with the release of the Open API. There is an iPhone application, unfortunately if you want to use it you’ll have to jailbreak your iPhone.See my interview with Fring below:

This post was originally posted June 18th on Mashable.com

Technorati tags: fring, open api, api, mobile, voip, israel media tour, mashable, blonde20, blonde 2.0, developers, applications, wifi, avi shechter, tel aviv, roy timor-rousso, iphone, sip

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Applications, Events, Startups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.