Free Cross Platform Video Calling – Care to Tango?

Marla Shaivitz Mar 11, 2011 Tweet

A serial entrepreneur plus one of the world’s leading experts in peer-to-peer video streaming equals one gang-buster of an app – Tango.

Tango is a free mobile video calling service that works over 3G, 4G, and Wi-Fi. It debuted in the App Store and Android Market on September 30, 2010 and clocked 75,000 downloads that day alone. Ten days later, the company hit its first million downloads.

Tango.me, the company behind the app, reports that a million people join the service every two weeks and is seeing “incredibly high usage and engagement with the service.”

The app works on the iPhone 3GS, 4G, iPod touch, iPad, and dozens of Android phones and tablets. It was co-founded by Uri Raz, a seven time serial technology entrepreneur and Eric Setton, one of the world’s leading experts in the technology who wrote the first book on the subject, Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming, in 2007.

Tango is cross platform and cross network, which is what gives it the edge over its competitors in the video calling space: Apple Facetime which only works on Wi-Fi and on the latest iOS devices, and Skype whose video calling service only works on iOS.

“We want to give people around the world free audio and video calling wherever they are. We believe adding video to a call is transformative as moving from fax to email. Billions of video calling minutes are made on PCs every year and we believe people want this capability on a device they have with them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Our growth has proved this. There is a lot happening in this space and we haven’t even scratched the surface.”

The Palo Alto-based company recently raised $8.7 million in funding, which will undoubtedly help to add to the millions of people already ‘Tangoing’ with their smart devices.

If you’re a fan of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, you may have seen the app in action in Prime Time: