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SA startup wants to give you phone calls for free

If you’re a regular maker or receiver of Please Call Me (PCM) services in South Africa, you’re not alone. There are over a billion Please Call Me requests made on networks here every month – that’s a lot of people low on credit who need to reverse the charges on an important call.

What if there was a way to place short calls of less than a minute or so long and not incur any charges at all? That’s the premise behind up-and-coming startup UmoyAir, whose service is all about connecting people for no cost.

Instead, it’s looking to advertisers to subsidise a 60 second call for the privilege of getting access to ears.

“Mobile advertising is a R1.3bn business,” says UmoyAir co-founder Khayalethu Nontsana Cokoto, “With UmoyAir advertisers get a valuable demographically defined audience and users get a free call.”

Using UmoyAir is a familiar experience for anyone who’s tried out PCM. Callers simply SMS the number they want to connect to, and UmoyAir’s servers dial straight back. A short advert – around 10 seconds – is then played down the line, after which the original call is connected. The exact length of the call hasn’t been decided yet, but Cokoto says that the firm is looking at about a minute of airtime per advert played – suggesting that longer calls might be possible so long as you don’t mind interruptions.

A minute per advert may be expensive for advertisers compared to, say, internet advertising. Assuming a wholesale call rate of 30-40c a minutes, advertisers will be looking at around R500 per thousand calls, which is about double a good rate for targeted online ads per thousand (and factors of 10 or more above most online rates). Cokoto is confident that the company will break even in its first year, however – and he’s not alone. UmoyAir is one of 11 companies currently working through the MEDO business acceleration program, which culminates with a fact-finding and educational trip to the UK later in the year. Cokoto’s co-founder Sapho Maqhwazima says that the pair are hoping to license their technology to overseas telecoms as a result of their visit to the UK.

UmoyAir aren’t the first to use Please Call Me-like services as a method of selling ads. Vodacom itself uses PCM responses as a way of sending out SMS adverts which – if targeted correctly – have a very high response rate. When Vodacom’s own Vouchercloud online discount store launched its USSD service, it took the firm just two weeks to build up a userbase of 80 000 people largely thanks to the fact that it was promoted to anyone who dialled a PCM number.

[Image -Khayalethu Nontsana Cokoto, Sapho Maqhwazima]

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