Talkonaut is a mobile Jabber client that allows users to free chat to Jabber/XMPP, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM contacts; participate in conference rooms and make voice calls to Google Talk, MSN, Yahoo and SIP contacts or other phones using our VoIP infrastructure. Evgeny Korolenko has extensive experience in software development. While he was a student, he worked for a telecommunications company in Tyumen and developed ISP and ITSP billing systems. Later, when he was a postgraduate, he led a team of developers at Tyumen State Oil and Gas University which built a corporate information system for his Alma Mater completely based on Web technologies. Personal interests: cars, skiing.

Ruslan Zalata – while he was a student at TSOGU, he worked for a number of Russian telecommunications companies as a UNIX system administrator, network engineer and consultant. Later, as a postgraduate, he led a group of network technicians who first designed and built a university corporate network, then a city-wide educational network infrastructure in Tyumen, Russia (the project was sponsored by the regional government). Personal interests: big jeep cars, extreme sports: snowboarding and inline skates. Do you see the mobile IM market really taking off, or do you think that it will take more time before it reaches critical mass?

Definitely. People are ready for something better than SMS. They want to have chats with their friends around the Globe on PCs and mobiles, no matter what IM systems they belong to. They want to participate in cool text chat rooms, they want to use the whole power of presence and they don’t want to pay $0.10 (sometimes even more) for each 170 bytes of text they send. Finally, that’s the coolest way to utilize their data plans they already paid for :-).

Being a Russian based company, what have you found to be the biggest obstacles in breaking into the US market?

Speaking about mobile markets, we quickly understood that in US there’s no real competition between carriers. But what is worse, carriers did their best to tie up users to their services either by locking handsets (so you cannot easily switch to another carrier nor can you run third party apps like Talkonaut) or by offering much cheaper, but very limited data plans which makes it impossible to use third party apps. What is most annoying is that handset developers (like RIM with their BlackBerry) are following the game. It’s virtually impossible to work around mobile carriers if you want to make a buck. If you try to you will probably lose. European and Asian markets are very different, users here can easily switch between carriers just by replacing a SIM card (one can have a single SIM card tie to many carriers which allows switching fast :-)) and can use their phones with the apps they like. But this also may change once mobile VoIP and IM become extremely popular and carriers will face a need either to take “protective” measures or to adjust to new rules and this will be a very uneasy way go for them.

The other thing which upsets us most is that US customers and investors don’t trust any services provided by companies which are not based in the Bay Area (or at least in US). There are some exceptions of course (namely Skype), but the fact is you cannot get very popular if you are a Russian based startup. That is why we are in a search for partners in US (mainly other small startup companies) who are interested in integrating our developments into theirs to achieve even better products or services for users and to benefit us both.

Since there were two of you that founded Talkonaut, what has been the decision making process for determining who does what?

Actually we have two projects running: GTalk2VoIP and Talkonaut. GTalk2VoIP is an open VoIP gatewaying service for major VoIM clients (Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo) which allows user to make free calls between different types of VoIM networks and paid calls to PSTN. This service was born as a “proof of concept” research by my colleague Ruslan Zalata when we worked together for the IT department at the local university. There’s an article at http://www.gtalk2voip.com/article1_en.html written by him on how the gateway was created and turned into a public service in March of 2006. Some months later (July 2006) we came to a thought that bringing all these VoIP services combined with IM to mobiles might be a very decent idea, so we started to work on it nightly. Ruslan worked on the server side part and I was developing the mobile application. Actually, I already had my own J2ME framework done, so it allowed us to build the feature-rich Talkonaut app in a very short period of time. At the moment of public run of Talkonaut (it was November 2006) our first project let us get some financial independence, so we completely quit our day jobs and started pumping it up with both server and app features.

Ruslan also does customer support over emails and on the forum because he has some experience in this and has better English knowledge. All paper work is done together. Usually a question “who does what” does not arise because each does what he’s best at.

What is your favorite cell phone of all time?

We have tried a lot of handsets. Some are very good, others less. But, what you should avoid is any Windows Mobile based device. It’s hard to explain all the negative user experiences you get with Windows Mobile, but believe me it’s ridiculous and completely not a suited OS to be used on phones. Ruslan enjoys his Sony-Ericsson W850i now and I’m currently using Nokia E60. But the best mobile phone is yet to be developed .

Copyright © 2007 by Will Kern

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