Mobivox and Unyk Come Up With an Interesting Solution for Mobile Users

There is an interesting announcement today for everyone exploring opportunities of using VoIP telephony instead of regular calls on their cell phones to cut costs. Mobivox and Unyk announce partnership today and this partnership is intended to offer quite an interesting combination of services to mobile users.

Mobivox is a Montreal-based company that provides a range of various VoIP services to its customers - some free, others pretty cheap. Unyk is also based in Montreal (which sounds very much like the major connecting factor for the two companies). This company develops a smart auto-updated address book which sounds very similar to what Plaxo offers since it also imports all the contacts from various address books and sends updated information once you change your address or phone to all your contacts everywhere (as well as updating your own address books with it). Unyk claims 10 million registered users with 3 million monthly unique visitors but the impressive part is that Unyk currently manages 480M individual contacts for their users which must be some indication of the large scale for today’s partnership.

The partnership announced today means that all the Unyk users will be able to browse their contact books and place low-cost VoIP calls using any phone. An important part is that Mobivox services are voiced-activated so browsing the address book and calling a person is really done in a very simple manner here by placing commands with one’s voice.

The partnership is announced today but we should not expect the promised functionality to arrive just yet - measured beta will be available in November and the service will be rolled out to all Unyk users by January 2009.

In general I very much like the idea of someone managing (and remembering - which is even more important) all my contact information somewhere in the cloud so that next time I lose or have my phone stolen, I will still be able to find any contact. For now Plaxo is my service of choice for that but I will be sure to create an account with Unik now that they promise this voice-based access combined with VoIP calls available at a reasonable price.