We have just added the ability to send an SMS from Australia to India. It works like this:

Send an SMS to 0424 215 121 starting with the number in India you want to SMS and then finishing with your text message. An example SMS would look like:

919810000000 Hello from Oz, hope everything is good. Miss you lots, talk tomorrow

The first part of the SMS contains the number you want to send the SMS to in India. We take that number from the message, pass it into our system, and deliver the rest of the message to that number in India. The person getting the text in India will see that it came from your number in Australia.

You’ll be charged by your mobile provider for the cost of sending a regular Australian SMS, and we’ll deliver it internationally for you. Most mobile plans have Australian SMS bundled into their cap, but charge extra for sending internationally. This gets around that and saves you money.

This will work for any mobile in Australia, not just IndiaLD account holders, and you can send texts to a ton of additional countries, not just India. We’ll post the full list soon. In the meantime, I need some of our Australian customers to test this out for sending to India and let me know if it works ok or not.

If you hadn’t noticed, we just launched a new design for the website. It was time to update our look and reflect our shift to a more full serviced provider of India calling products. The first time you visit the new site, you might find yourself between the old look still cached on your browser and the new look. If you are having that problem, just refresh the pages.

We also launched customer service phone and live chat support. Right now the hours are very awkward (9:30PM to 5:30 AM PST, 7 Days A Week), but that will only be for a short period of time while our team gets trained on the phones and fully staffed. We expect to offer 16 hour a day phone and chat support in the next 2 weeks and have the phones open at more convenient hours.

Since phone support is new, it might take our team a little bit of time to get comfortable. Please be gentle and help them along with their first couple of calls.

As always, we want to hear your feedback about these most recent enhancements. Let me know what you think of the new site, and if there is anything that needs fixing or could be better. After this, we are turning to two projects: upgrade/downgrade tool and free SMS to India.

SMS is going to be web-based for now, except in Australia. Australian customers, we should have a way to send free SMS from your mobile to Australia really soon.

And yeah, I know the blog is still on the old design. We’ll get that moved over soon.

Here is a quick protip:

If you want to redial the last number you called. Wait until the call has ended. When the prompt asks if you want to make another call, select 1 then dial 00.

00 tells our IVR to call the last number you dialed so you won’t need to dial it again.

Thanks to Anand for asking me about this.

We are aware that there are some problems calling India right now. One of our carriers is having issues. We are in the process of isolating the problem and changing our routing to avoid the problem carrier.

I just spent sometime looking at our followers on Twitter, and a lot of you are asking questions or making comments about IndiaLD, but not directing them to us. On Twitter, if you want us to see your post you need to start it with @IndiaLD.

For example:

@IndiaLD How do I call the UK using my account?

The @IndiaLD tells Twitter to direct your comment to our account, and lets me see it when I login on Twitter. Otherwise it gets lost out there in the internets. Please make sure that you start any tweet with @IndiaLD if you want me to see it and respond.

While on the subject of Twitter. Most of our free minute giveaways are limited to the first X number of people who respond, or everyone who emails me in a certain period of time. I get a lot of emails looking for Twitter giveaways after a particular giveaway is over. If you are close I sometimes will give it to you, but people emailing me days after a giveaway are not going to get free minutes. Sorry, but we run out of free minutes sometimes… ; )

This latest giveaway is going to run for awhile though. I want to know what brand and model of mobile phones you use…50 free minutes to everyone who tells me that. Follow the instructions here.

We are in the process of redesigning our website because we are running out of room on the home page to promote all our great features, and because its time for something a bit more professional than what I can code myself. :sniff:

As part of the redesign, we would like to include testimonials from our happy customers. If you enjoy IndiaLD, and want to share your thoughts, please provide a testimonial in the comments section below. Include your first name,  the state/country you live in now, and a couple of sentences recommending us.

By posting a testimonial below, you agree to allow us to resuse it on the site and in other promotional materials…Also let’s keep this on topic. Only put testimonials in here, no customer service issues, or feature suggestions.
Thanks.

You guys asked for it. We listened. Now its here. Top Up Minutes just went live.

You can now buy additional blocks of minutes for your account online and instantantly. Running out of minutes? Don’t worry, just login to your account management area, click on the Top Up link and buy more minutes for your account. You can buy as little as 100 minutes and as many as 1000. The best part is that we are going to charge you the same amount per minute as your current plan.

For example if you are in the India 1000 plan, your cost of minutes is currently 1.99 cents per minute. Buying 100 Top Up minutes will just cost you $1.99. If you are in the India 3000 plan, you will pay 1.39 cents per minute, and 100 minutes will cost you $1.39.

If you use the Top Up tool, you’ll never run out of minutes again. You can keep topping up your account during the month. Just make sure you don’t buy too many minutes, since they do not rollover.

If you happen to go over your minutes before you top up, we’ll let you buy those minutes for the top up rate instead of the overage rate of 3.9 cents/min. That means you can use up your monthly minutes, go into the overage, but then pay Top Up prices for those extra minutes you called.

So the overage rate stays, but as long as you pay for those minutes before your next billing cycle we’ll charge you the same price as a Top Up. If you don’t pay for them then, then we are going to charge you the normal overage rate. No exceptions on that either, as it will be too difficult to adjust some billing charges after the fact.

We realize that our rigid block of monthly minutes was creating a need for some of you to upgrade and downgrade your plan all the time. We also realize that some of you ran out of minutes, needed to call India, and couldn’t wait for us to manually add more minutes to your account.

The Top Up tool solves that problem. You guys asked, we listened, and everyone should be happy with the results.

I am writing a spec for an automated upgrade/downgrade tool right now, so look for the ability to upgrade and downgrade your own account in a month or so. We also got some more tricks up our sleeve, but I can’t talk about those yet.

Some good news and some bad news for our customers up in Canada.

The good news is that we are adding 14 local access numbers in Canada. You can find the number closest to you here. This covers all the major metro areas that our customers are in. If you find that we are missing a metro area, let us know in the comments.

The bad news is that we are discontinuing our toll free access number in Canada. This was not our decision, and we regret having to turn this number off. Our carrier in Canada decided to raise our rates substantially and gave us extremely short notice. Given the new cost of the toll free number, we have to disconnect it or we would be losing money on every call made from Canada. I do not expect us to replace it with another toll free number.

Our toll free number will be disconnected tomorrow, June 24th. The new local access numbers are up and working now. Let me know if you have any troubles with them.

Our 949 259-9999 access number is running at max capacity this weekend and people are getting busy signals at time.

If you are having this problem, use (530) 645-5555. This access number routes through a different call center and should have plenty of capacity to handle everyone.

Sorry about the problems. We were told by our supplier that there was plenty of capacity on that number and are looking into why its throwing busy signals.

I’m in Bangalore with our mobile developers right now. A design question came up and we need your help. We are working on  a mobile app which will auto dial international numbers stored in your contact/address book. The app will let you select a phone number in your book, then call it through the IndiaLD gateway  without any need to dial the access number, enter a PIN, or enter the destination number.

How do you guys store international/Indian phone numbers in your address book as it relates to the country code?

+91 (then number)

011 91 (then number)

91 (the number)

Or some other way? Post a comment and let us know. It will help us get this out quicker. The Windows version will be coming first in hopefully a couple weeks.