Voice Startup 'Hello' Hopes to Offer Skype Alternative

On Indiegogo, a new campaign titled ‘hello’ was launched today. Paul Grimshaw, the campaign's mastermind, says his goal is to create “the Mozilla (News - Alert) of telephony.”

The 36-year-old Grimshaw provides IT support across London, where he lives with his wife and two children. "I have a keen interest in technology, open source applications and digital rights. This has been a dream of mine for a long time, and I feel the world is ready for it too," Grimshaw explains.

The Indiegogo campaign states, "Your funding will build a new communications platform.

Hello is a free open source application providing video, voice and chat securely and privately. This is combined with a competitive and ethical commercial platform offering advanced features, Web service integrations and real world telephone numbers."

It also states, "To be clear: You're funding an idea; this project doesn't yet exist at all. All the technologies do exist in various forms to make this happen, but we need to collate and fold it together into a simple to use, consumer (and business) friendly package."

According to Grimshaw, the peer-to-peer voice startup is unique as it offers complete customization and branding. Grimshaw says that users will be able to connect between different providers and move freely between them.

“All the technologies exist in various forms to make this happen,” he wrote on the company’s website.

Hello says it is offering a Skype (News - Alert) replacement that gives users free peer to peer calls, but also offers you voice/video calls as well as sending SMS messages. It promises secure encryption, cross platform, free and open source, third party integration, call filtering, unified mailbox for calls, texts, IM and voicemails and disposable phone numbers. Like Skype-to-Skype, hello-to-hello calls will be completely free.

Depending on the amount of funding the project raises it plans on launching native apps for iOS, Android (News - Alert), Windows Phone, Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS.