Macalla & Fonepool Launch SMS Prepaid Top-Up Service for J1 Student

Fonepool offers a pre-paid phone service to the 10,000 Irish J1 visa holders who travel to the US on Work and Travel Programmes each year. The company will deliver the service to J1 visa holders from more than twenty countries in 2004, concentrating on Europe in the summer months and southern hemisphere countries including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil and Argentina in the winter months. In contrast to Europe, pre-paid services account for a small fraction of the US mobile market, making it difficult for prepaid phone users to find outlets that sell pre-paid services. To support Fonepools offering, Macalla Softwares solution enables students to simply text message a demand for fresh credit to a local number that triggers a transaction for the appropriate amount to be charged to an authorised credit card, without the needs for vouchers. Fonepool launched the service last year enabling student workers to purchase a US mobile phone for €87 that works across the US, including $40 credit. Fonepool succeeded in recruiting 1,000 Irish students during the summer and the same number of Australians and New Zealanders during winter and has recently signed a strategic two-year agreement with operator T-Mobile USA, the fourth largest provider of mobile phone services in the US. The company is targeting J1 programme participants from emerging markets in Central and Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, growing its market to the 200,000 people who visit the US on a J1 visa each year.