Blackberry Mobility Featured Article

Launching in the App Store and Android (News - Alert) Marketplace, Tango is a free, high-quality mobile video calling service that connects people around the world from wherever they are. People can “Tango” on iPhones and Android phones over 3G, 4G and WiFi.

Tango offers high-quality video calling for iPhone (News - Alert) 3GS and iPhone 4, and Android devices including Motorola Droid X, HTC EVO, HTC Incredible, and Google Nexus One, and works with carrier phone and data plans, and on WiFi (News - Alert) networks.

“The idea for Tango evolved a year ago when I had a personal problem to solve – how to easily stay connected with family and friends who lived overseas,” said Uri Raz, co-founder and CEO of Tango. “Today we are announcing free mobile video calling on iPhones and Android phones, and our vision is to allow anyone in the world to make free video calls on all of their Internet connected screens.”

“Mobile video calling on 3G is a very difficult problem to solve with massive engineering requirements needed,” said Eric Setton, co-founder and CTO of Tango. “We’ve built the best team in the world to solve this problem and are incredibly excited to make Tango available… on iPhone and Android. We believe mobile video calling should always be free for everyone so we’ve built a service that can scale to hundreds of millions of people with low infrastructure costs to make this a reality. We are focused on delivering the best product and consumer experience possible and can’t wait to see how people Tango.”

Other Tango features include:

Free, high-quality mobile video calls over 3G, 4G, and WiFi so you can talk from wherever you are, to anyone across the globe;

Tango between iPhones and Android phones;

It’s easy to turn video on and off during a Tango call;

Tango contacts automatically populate from existing phone contact list;

New profile not required – Tango in seconds;

Swap the large and small screens to have a better view of what you’re showing;

Works on phones with one or two cameras so you can see yourself and the friend you Tangoed, or just share what you see;

Invite friends and others with one click by e-mail or text.

The company added that the commonplace of smartphones and greatly improved networks have created a huge market opportunity for mobile video calling. There are more than 325 million smartphones already in use and more than 1 billion people worldwide are expected to be using smartphones by 2013.

Considering the wireless voice market is expected to reach $1 trillion in the next two years, video calling will become a natural extension of the regular calling experience. Skype (News - Alert) is a perfect example of this dynamic growth as 550 million people rack up billions of minutes of calls each month on its PC-based video product where 40 percent of people make video calls.

Tango is a free download in the App Store and Android Marketplace. You can Tango with anyone in your contact list that has downloaded the application to his or her phone.

Founded in September 2009, the company has raised $5 million from the top individual investors in Silicon Valley including Bill Hambrecht, Michael Birch, Bill Tai, and Daniel Scheinman (News - Alert). Tango is based in Palo Alto, Calif.