DEMO: Vic Wave brings more free calls to your computer

Vic Wave is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.
Skype has become a popular way to make cheap calls from your computer, but those costs can still add up — it’s not free if you’re calling a land line or cell phone, rather than another Skype account. If it’s a long-distance call, it can get pretty expensive (as I’ve learned from experience). But a company called Vic Wave is announcing a new service that allows consumers to make long-distance calls from their computers to land line phones without paying a fee.
The Victoria, British Columbia-based company accomplishes this by selling its service to businesses and other organizations. For example, if a bank wanted to offer a free, easy way for customers to get in touch, it could include a Vic Wave button on its site, and anyone visiting the site could click and immediately call the company from their browser. It’s free for the caller and it doesn’t require them to download a Vic Wave application — you just need to have the Flash plug-in installed.
Chief executive H.I. Choi said Vic Wave is already live on the University of Victoria web site, allowing students, faculty, and staff to offer a free way for people to call them. Beyond selling to individual companies, Vic Wave could also make deals with telephone companies, who could customize and resell the service to their customers.
Right now, Vic Wave doesn’t work on iPhones, since Apple’s smartphone doesn’t run Flash, but Choi said he’s hoping to offer Vic Wave using HTML5 (the formatting language of the web) eventually.
The company has raised a small amount of seed funding.
Tags: DemoBeat, DEMOSpring10
Companies: Vic Wave
People: H.I. Choi