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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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APRIL 1, 2003
Thinking Outside the (Phone) Lines [Page 2 of 2] To say Pulver is a self-promoter is an understatement. His accounts of his adventures in Internet voice are peppered with phrases such as "and that's how I got famous" and stories whose moral is that he's "just doing this for the people." Still, most participants in the VOIP business don't seem to mind: "My experience with Jeff is that what you see is what you get," says David Isenberg, a telecom consultant who has been attending VON conferences for several years. "Sure he's self promotional, but that's because he believes in what he's doing." Pulver's interest in VOIP is also evident in his serial entrepreneurial ventures. Not the type to write business plans, he uses money he earns from conference planning to launch companies and see where they take him. Three years ago, Pulver, along with his uncle, Fred Pulver, invented the CellSocket, a cell-phone cradle that solves two common complaints. It has an external antenna that delivers better reception in low-signal areas, such as the basement of a home. And it plugs into a regular phone, allowing a caller to use it to make cellular calls, which eliminates the inconvenience of using small cell handsets at home. To date, Pulver's company, named WHP after his father William Howard Pulver, has manufactured 40,000 of the units, whose basic model sells for $99. FREE PHONING. At the moment, though, Pulver's passion remains Free World DialUp -- something critics call a "Napster for phones." Free World DialUp is a free service that allows people to circumvent the public-phone network by connecting voice calls over the Internet using a PC or an "IP telephone," a specially designed $250 handset manufactured by the likes of Cisco (CSCO ) and others (see the Mar. 28 story "FBI Seeks Internet Telephony Surveillance" by BW Online content partner Security Focus). So far, Free World DialUp has nearly 13,000 subscribers from over 65 countries. Pulver says he regularly fields calls from major corporations such as Citibank (C ) that are investigating using the technology for intraoffice calling. Typically, Pulver has several other companies in the works. His favorite new venture is developing software that would give telephones the automatic-response capabilities of instant-messenger software. "What I've always wanted is to have a service provider that would make sure that if someone calls me in the middle of the night, I don't hear it ring, " Pulver says. "Instead, the person gets a message saying, 'Hi -- it's 4:48 a.m. in New York. Chances are, the Pulvers are sleeping. If you knowingly want to wake us up, press one. Otherwise, leave a message.' Now what happens is that if the person dials through and says, 'Hi, did I wake you?' and I say, 'You know damn well you did.'" "HEAVY LIFTING." The idea isn't without precedent. But Pulver's determination to make it a reality makes him a standout in the telecom industry. Three years after the Net bubble burst, humbled telecom entrepreneurs are focused primarily on products that serve the status quo. "One of my goals is to do the heavy lifting for the [telecom] industry by trying to develop markets for innovative services," Pulver says. Maybe someday, consumers everywhere will thank him.
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