Great, a chance for me to make a shameless plug about Morodo and our product: MO-Call Mobile VoIP! Kidding (kinda).
So in pretty much all my previous posts I would digress and start talking about my work at Morodo Beijing. I kept telling myself that I would make a post to talk about work; and, although I’m really trying to make it a habit to sleep early, I’m going to break my ’sleeping-early’ rule and churn this post out.
(I think I’ll write this post out in a FAQ sort of layout, answering the questions that people have been asking me as they come to mind; at least this way my writing will be somewhat coherent, because I’m really tired right now, heh.)
Where are you working?
I’m working in the marketing team (which consists of about four of us in total) at Morodo Group Ltd, and although my focus is in search and online marketing (which is what I was also doing at adSage/MeshTop last year), I’ve actually been assigned a pretty diverse rotation of responsibilities to get me up to speed with the company and product; from managing the files on the app stores, to working with the CSS (that’s Customer Sales and Service, not Cascading Style Sheets) team talking with customers from all around the world- I think my most interesting task with CSS was to test out our network routes to Russia, so I was calling all these banks and hotels in Russia to see if the calls would go through- and when they did, I’d have to make up some random excuse to talk to them and not be rude and hang up on them, “Hi, yes; I was thinking of making a trip to Moscow and I was wondering if you had any vacancies?”. Fun- and when they would transfer me to reservations or put me on hold, then I’d hang up on them; haha.
What’s Morodo?
A lot of my friends have asked if Morodo is another marketing agency, but it’s actually a UK based startup in the telecommunications industry. What we aim to do at Morodo is to provide a solution for users to avoid the crazy international calling rates when calling abroad, and also to avoid the expensive roaming rates when traveling internationally. Morodo has created an application called MO-Call, which runs in the background on cell phones, and automatically detects when an international number is being dialed. The MO-Call app then switches to the MO-Call network to avoid the expensive roaming rates that the cellular companies charge. It’s actually pretty cool- maybe I’ll post up some diagrams to kinda illustrate what goes on within the MO-Call network. If you want to read more about the MO-Call process: How to Avoid Mobile Roaming Rates.
MO-Call World Service: The World service uses an SMS to request a callback connection from the MO-Call network.
MO-Call Home Service: The Home service directly connects to the MO-Call network server if the user is in a 'Home' country.
MO-Call VoIP: MO-Call VoIP allows you to connect to other MO-Call users for free, or avoid international calling rates to international phones. Our next builds of MO-Call VoIP will implement VoIP calling through the mobile application.
So basically, is Morodo like Skype?
Yes, and no? The MO-Call PC VoIP provides the same service as Skype, however the main service is the MO-Call Mobile application that detects when users want to connect to an international number, and automatically connects to the MO-Call network. The cool thing that I’ve found about trying the MO-Call service is that I don’t need to dial in any calling codes or anything; I used to have a calling card when I first moved to the US for college, and I would keep forgetting the service number and PIN; yeah, I’m forgetful =p.
Erm, well; I can’t really think of any other questions that people have asked- and I’m really tired, hehe.
I’ll leave you all with some pics that I snapped of the workplace around me. Oh and the cool thing about work is that there are a lot of handsets in the office, because the developers need to build and test the application on multiple devices. My latest toy has been the HTC Tattoo. Hopefully they’ll get a Nexus One in? I’d like to just get one for myself… but I need to watch my spending. Chinese income; yay! hehe.
Horizon International - The Morodo Beijing office building
Welcome to Morodo Beijing- The wall is newly painted; it used to be this really ugly looking wall, heh.
The CTO's desk/office - It's open so he'll know if we're goofing off or not...
Symbian and Windows Mobile developers sit here; the other developers are in another part of the office.
Snuck in a shot of my marketing manager; hehe
I would say that it's pretty cool that I'm working on an iMac, except that my MacBook Pro is faster than it... lol
(I just realized that I have time-stamps on all my pictures… I guess you can see the order that I took these pictures in, heh)
-Duncan