I'm building a competing product at
http://Bitphone.net It's not quite ready to launch yet, but we are getting there. I'm also sad to see chiliphone go. I am a competitor, yes, but its better to have many products that can grow the user base of bitcoin phone customers than for one site to try to reach all the traffic. You learn this stuff as you get older
I saw in another forum post the developer wasn't making much money and couldn't advertise, etc. to generate enough revenue to make it profitable. This may be true, I'm sure this is a tough market. You are in the end competing with Skype, Google Voice, Traditional telcos and pretty much every VoIP service that's out there. Telco is cut rate, cheapest rates win! Phone call minutes are priced like commodities..
I'm going into this (Investing my own money to build BitPhone) knowing full-well that it will be tough to compete with the aforementioned companies. At the end of the day its about placing calls and paying for them. Then what kind of phone are you using and how did you dial the call (some contact list, clickable link, dial it manually ?)
Chiliphone was the first Bitcoin phone to utilize WebRTC technology to make the browser itself the phone. I applaud the developer of chiliphone for building what he did!
WebRTC is a fairly new technology, and still a work in progress.
http://www.w3.org/TR/webrtc/I plan to offer a similar "payphone" functionality in BitPhone, but I've taken WebRTC to the next level and built a Secure WebRTC Portal which you can create. A portal is really just a unique Url that you can share with others, when they goto the same link the portal becomes a pure, encrypted, peer-peer connection between the users in the portal. You can share video, audio, files, screenshare and chat all through this private portal. This is similar to other services that offer "web-conferencing" but all based on Bitcoin and using WebRTC (your browser) to do everything. You won't need to install any software (maybe a browser extension) to make all this work!
I plan to offer an custom domain like whatever.bitphone.net for a small monthly fee.
We will hopefully be launching a limited beta next month!
Gavin