Headquartered at the Nyenrode Estate in Breukelen is the Dutch company RBN, a fairly new mobile VoIP applications startup founded in 2010, which has opted to make Canada its second home. The company looks to broaden its appeal to global markets and sees particularly strong growth, from 2013 forward, in the Canadian economy, especially in metropolitan areas of Canada such as Toronto.
Also making the move to Canada are SoSocio, another Dutch startup firm based in Breukelen that specializes in developing innovative Facebook apps, and Layar, a privately-held Dutch company that specializing in mobile augmented reality.
A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a global professional services firm, revealed that “the app economy” and VoIP in 2013 will continue to grow as going mobile becomes more central to everyday life. As a result, PwC affirmed that there is no better time to start creating apps, as it’s believed that if the trends keep going strong, the number of mobile device users will continue to increase.
Mobile app development is and will continue to make an economic impact in Canada, as it does elsewhere. Lately, it has been the three high-tech startup companies in the Netherlands that have played an important role in aiding the explosive growth of mobile communications services in Canada.
As RingCredible CEO and Brooklyn Ventures Partner Hans Osnabrugge stated to The Canadian Business Journal, instead of going to Silicon Valley, his company decided to plant its roots in Toronto because he believes that Canada “is an ideal first step for today’s newest startups…It’s an impressive and proven market and there is an impressively high penetration of smartphones and tablets.”
He also mentioned that its mobile VoIP technology had opted to move to Canada after experiencing three years of market success in its home country. Now with the move to Canada, which has about twice the population, he envisions the company’s presence will be welcomed by consumers only if the company can provide all it promises—which is to provide the best rates in the market with its easy-to-use app solution and service that results in cheaper costs with no risks for consumers.
At present, RBN offers a consumer product, the RingCredible mobile VoIP multiplatform smartphone app, which launched in late 2012 and is available on the Apple iOS, Android and BlackBerry platforms—a Windows Phone app is currently under development.
RBN also offers a white label business solution based on the same RingCredible technology that can be used by companies to facilitate mobile VoIP for their customers. This option offers long-term opportunities for companies to generate revenue, by promoting RingCredible to customers, through a distribution partnership based on revenue share models.
The emergence of VoIP, or voice-over-Internet protocol, technology has already helped push down the cost of making a phone call, especially an international one. Like using Skype, which is another VoIP service offered to mobile customers, the RingCredible app can make cheap international phone calls as well anywhere in the world over Wi-Fi and 3G/4G. However, with RingCredible users have extremely low rates; it is said to be “at least [80 percent] cheaper than your cell provider and [at least 60 percent] cheaper than Skype.” As stated by RBN, this solves the problem of “high cost of long distance mobile calls within Canada by lowering the expense by about 90 percent.”
Furthermore, the Breukelen startup company option is a VoIP service that gives emphasis to the concept that “it doesn’t matter where you call from. You only pay for where you call to!”
What makes this app and service stand out, according to Osnabrugge, is that RingCredible is private and secure as well as practical; it lets users call anyone, anywhere, on almost any smartphone. Plus, it is also affordable and offers high quality and reliable calls. Even more, it “does not upload contact lists to the cloud, does not sell a user’s data, and does not use annoying advertisements to disrupt the user experience or track online habits,” RDN stated proudly.
Those interested in using the RingCredible app can download it free today, from the iTunes App Store, Google Play or BlackBerry World. There is even the RingCredible desktop dialer for a Windows PC available at the developers’ site. There, end-users will receive a promotional offer that “includes 50 cents of trial credit, good for 30 minutes of free calls (on average).” And according to RBN, it takes only half a minute to sign up and make the first free call!
Edited by
Alisen Downey 
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