You are the parent of a student in a foreign exchange program, and haven’t heard from her in three weeks. When you finally do reach her, she tells you its too expensive for her to call from the cell phone you gave her before she left. You look at her cell phone bill and realize she’s right.

You are a U.S. military man in Iraq, and would love to call your wife and kids. But it’s too costly, so you stand in line for an Internet connection at the base.

You are the owner of a small business, and have finally taken a vacation to Asia. Even though this is the first time you have been away in years, you would still love to call your voicemail to see if everything is still all right at home. But the hotel you’re staying at charges $5.00 a minute for calls to the United States.

And that’s why Jing Liu invented MINO Wireless (www.minowireless.com), an inexpensive international calling solution for Internet-enabled cell phones and Blackberrys. With MINO’s software, people can call any one of 40 countries for about 2 cents per minute.

MINO is spreading virally among expatriates, travelers, and businesspeople who rely on cell phones. But it is also spreading to families whose loved ones are in remote locations, either temporarily or permanently. In the few months since it was launched in early 2006, sixty thousand users from over 50 countries have signed up to use MINO.

“I use Skype to call my girlfriend in China when I am on my computer. But now I prefer to talk from my mobile phone with MINO,” says John Klisch, a MINO user in Sunnyvale, California. “Making VOIP calls from a mobile phone is a great thing. You get good rates and you don’t have to deal with calling cards and PIN numbers, which have lots of hidden charges.”

MINO is simpler to use than Skype, because the person receiving a MINO call doesn’t need to be sitting at a computer, and the person making the call doesn’t need to be sitting at one, either. Once you have downloaded the MINO software to your Internet-enabled cell phone, you don’t need to dial anything but the country code and number you are calling, and MINO’s process connects to a VOIP network and completes the call.

MINO works with any Java-enabled phone, or any phone with a WAP browser, and is carrier-independent.

MINO Wireless was founded in 2004 and has been developing the technology to connect mobile phones to the Voice-Over-IP infrastructure for two years.

Contact: Jing Liu, 415.706.3784