Free Phone Calls from USA to Mexico and Canada via Credo Mobile?

Suzanne Bowen : Monetizing IP Communications
Suzanne Bowen
37 yrs in telecom, teaching, blog & grant writing, biz development, marketing, & PR. Favorite moments in life involve time w/ family & friends, networking, IP communications industry verticals & horizontals, running, traveling, foreign languages
| 1. "Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition..." Barack Obama ..... 2. "One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain." By Thomas Sowell

Free Phone Calls from USA to Mexico and Canada via Credo Mobile?

Something like that! USA mobile phone users are used to unlimited calling nationwide on mobile service plans, but add unlimited calling from USA to Mexico and Canada, and you've got a dream come true for at least ** 1.6 million Canadian immigrants and at least * 12.7 million Mexican immigrants who live in USA. This does not count in the number of people who are not immigrants who need to call either country for personal or business reasons. The Credo Mobile announcement was made on November 5, 2012: "In keeping with its progressive values, CREDO Mobile announced today that calls made from the U.S. to Mexico and Canada will be included in all voice plans at no extra charge starting mid-November."

Talk about uniting the Americas and making personal and business relationships among the people of these three countries (U.S.A., Mexico and Canada) easier than ever! The potential! The opportunities!

You know me and social marketing, especially anything that I believe is extremely empowering or innovative. I immediately dialed Credo Mobile headquarters from my LG Android phone, which uses Credo Mobile phone service, to see if I could interview them. Listen now to a recorded audio podcast on iTunes or DIDX between me and Credo Mobile's Haruko Kurata, VP of Product Development, and Becky Bond, their VP and Political Director.

What we talked about ...

Credo Mobile's voice and new MiFi service:
The choice to add calls from USA to Mexico and Canada to all mobile plans without adding extra cost is a result of their customer-centric approach. There is not any other mobile phone service that offers this. Credo Mobile will also add a new data product soon that enables customers with Android smart phones and the ability to "HotSpot." Becky Bond, after testing it, says that up to a total of three devices can access Internet at one time on the plan.

Credo Mobile's progressive vision and activism:
See, I asked a seventy-two-year-old neighbor of mine in Northwest Florida why he cast his presidential vote as he did. The first of many reasons he gave me include the fact that the Koch Brothers bought the company he worked for and laid him off. It took him four years to find another job. He had a wife and children to support.

Poll Workers for Democracy has an aim to make sure that every eligible voter can cast a ballot that counts. It is one of the many powerful progressive programs of Credo Mobile. I have an intense interest in this program since I have been driving elderly citizens to the polls to vote for the past three elections. One probably does not realize how difficult it is for these "politically-savvy persons who just happen to be older" people to get to the polls, to be treated fairly and to be taken seriously at the polls where they have a right to vote. It feels like poll-bullying. Such a small thing that I do ... but, everytime I visit my own 70-something-year-old parents and listen to their wisdom and experience, I know I have to do this every four years.

"CredoMobile shifted its focus from "the right to vote" to forming a Super-PAC of its own and working to defeat ten of the worst tea party Republicans in the house," Becky Bond said. "Go door to door ... make phone calls ... give voters rides to the polls ... of the ten, we defeated four ..."

Becky Bond stated, "Volunteerism ... is what it takes to keep this country in the hands of the people and not corporations."

She also shared that Credo Mobile is a "social change organization with an awesome mobile phone service."

(My experience and reason for using Credo Mobile: I've been using their service because I of that very combination. I like the quality, the price and the fact that I can be a part of such practices that are important to me ... such as a more shared economy, elderly citizens' rights, and support of diplomacy instead of more costly wars at the expense of education and other domestic needs.)

Credo Mobile business:
They are now a progressive MVNO and in business for 25 years. They are also a long distance phone company, originally named Working Assets, of they still have many landline users. Hiraku mentions Credo Mobile's past Green Power and Working Assets Radio as well as their new interest of participating in a shared economy. (Shared economy examples are peer-to-peer marketplaces such as DIDX, LendingClub and Airbnb ... the last which enables New Yorkers to offer free housing for Hurricane Sandy victims.)

As political director, Becky Bond helps CREDO customers and CREDO Action members fight for progressive change in Washington, D.C. and in state capitols. She is the president of CREDO SuperPAC and serves on the board of the New Organizing Institute. Becky ran CREDO’s campaign to register more than one million voters in 2004 and the successful effort to defeat California’s Prop 23 in 2010. She was the producer of Working Assets Radio, which aired on San Francisco’s NPR affiliate KALW from 2001–2003. Before that, Becky ran a conceptual art practice in San Francisco called South to the Future. She is a Nashville native and a political science graduate of Williams College. Becky uses a bicycle as everyday transportation and hasn’t owned a car since 2006. She is proud of having been arrested twice during her tenure at CREDO—protesting the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and protesting the Keystone XL pipeline at the White House in 2011.

From Suzanne Bowen Mobile Photo Gallery

Haruko Kurata oversees the acquisition and development of all mobile phones and related products at CREDO. Before joining CREDO, she served as Product Manager at Moderati, a mobile content provider. She worked with Qualcomm, as well as other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and operators to create content training and provide marketing support for Qualcomm's embedded multimedia software. Haruko holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Washington and an M.S. in electrical engineering from Santa Clara University. Throughout her career in technology, she has always been one of only a handful of women—something she hopes to see change in the future. She looks forward to a day when being a woman at the Consumer Electronics Show isn't an oddity.

The original Credo Mobile press release, regarding the addition of calls from U.S. to Mexico and Canada at no extra charge in all Credo Mobile voice plans, is at PR Newswire. Visit CredoMobile, CredoAction and the CredoMobile Facebook page for more.

The recorded audio podcast interview is on DIDX and on iTunes. Complete lists of audio podcasts with Suzanne Bowen and the movers and shakers of social media for business, mobile, and IP communications worlds are at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/didx-podcasts/id322949120 and http://www.didx.net/podcast/?p=archive&cat=all. Connect with me on Linkedin where I network and collaborate with hundreds of USA and international business movers and shakers like you. (Pictured at the top of this blog post are Haruko Kurata, Credo Mobile's VP of Product Development; Becky Bond, Credo Mobile's VP and Political Director; and Suzanne Bowen, Monetizing IP Communications blogger and audio podcaster.

* According to 2008 Pew: http://pewhispanic.org/files/factsheets/47.pdf

** According to 2009 CBC News: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2009/10/28/canada-emigration-c.html

 

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