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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 Jeff Pulver aims to change the way people talk by bringing innovative Internet telephony services to the masses At age 16, when Pulver got his first car, a 1980 Pontiac Trans Am, he figured out how to link an early cordless phone to his home phone via his ham radio. So, before mobile phones were even a dream for American consumers, Pulver had his own car phone. "It was geeky, but it was so cool," he remembers. "I could be 30 miles away from my house and patch myself through to anyone in the world." Pulver has continued to come up with communications inventions -- nowadays on an Internet scale. He's the man behind Free World Dial-Up, a service that, though still clumsy, allows anyone to make free calls anywhere in the world over a PC. He's co-founder and minority shareholder in Vonage, an Edison (N.J.) voice-over-Internet-protocol (VOIP) provider, that has signed up 15,000 customers who pay $40 per month for unlimited local and long-distance phone service. Pulver is also the inventor of the CellSocket, a device that allows cell-phone subscribers with more minutes than they can use to make and receive cellular voice calls via a standard phone. CONSUMER POWER. None of these innovations has turned the industry on its ear -- yet. But VOIP is a technology whose time is about to arrive. Already, 18 million U.S. homes have high-speed connections to the Net, a number that will double to more than 36 million by 2004, according to ARS Research. With broadband, U.S. households will have more choices for local-phone service -- and how it's delivered. That's Pulver's goal: "Over the last 50 years, the automobile has changed a lot," he notes. "Computers have certainly changed a lot. But the telephone hasn't really changed at all. That's a result of 125 years of monopolistic control. What I'm trying to do is create environments where we have consumer empowerment." Pulver, age 40, first became interested in Internet phone calling in 1995. He was at home sick one day from his job as a systems administrator at bond-trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald when he logged on to the Net and downloaded a piece of software that enabled PC users talk to one another over the Internet using a special sound card and a mini microphone. SET FREE. Pulver signed up for the service and used his ham radio handle as a nickname. Hundreds of other people were also hooking up like this. "All of a sudden, I found that my love affair with ham radio was being relived through a new technology," he remembers. "I was talking to all sorts of interesting people around the world again." With twin baby boys, Pulver wasn't sleeping through the night anyway. So he stayed up late putting together a directory for Net voice aficionados. A year later, on July 5, 1996, Pulver lost his job at Cantor -- or as he likes to say, "got his independence" -- and dedicated himself full-time to making VOIP a reality for more people. His first move was to bring together Net voice enthusiasts at a 1996 conference he called the Talking Net. He posted information on a mailing list and rented a room in New York's famous Puck Building. "I had no idea if 5 or 50 people would come," Pulver remembers. "Two hundred showed up, people who later became world famous founders of high-tech companies."
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