Right at the bottom of the pyramid are phone users who can’t afford the minimum cost for a SIM to share in someone else’s phone. Movirtu has produced a cloud-based, login account which will enable anyone who has access to a GSM phone to share it but still retain their own number. Russell Southwood spoke to the CEO and founder, Nigel Waller about the potential market for this low-cost telephony product.

Nigel Waller used to work in telecoms back-end infrastructure and during this time, an African operator asked him how it would be possible to deliver a phone service more cheaply in rural areas: just getting a SIM card to someone costs the operator around US$7 in markets without high taxes. He was driving on a snowy road in Moscow when the idea came to him: why not make the mobile service for the user based on a login like e-mail and then they could share phones?