FreedomPop, a wireless company heavily influenced by social sharing, announced today that they raised $4.3 million to improve its network, bringing its total funding to $11.4 million.
The revolutionary thing about FreedomPop is that it offers a data-sharing program on its network and social tools to help facilitate sharing or trading of data. Also, the more socially-networked friends you have on the FreedomPop network, the more free data you get, which is a way to encourage word-of-mouth and social network-enabled growth for the company.
As an example, FreedomPop's dashboard displays a list of your friends along with how much data they have left unused for that month. There are buttons for "Give" and "Get" next to each friend, meaning you can share extra data with a friend if he or she is running out, or vice-versa. You can also request more data through Facebook or Twitter from other FreedomPop subscribers.
In addition, every friend you add to your FreedomPop sharing system will get you 50MB free from the company. Already, FreedomPop users start with 500MB free per month, with options to pay for additional service, if you don't have enough willing friends with extra MBs laying around.
FreedomPop doesn't work with mobile manufacturers to develop specific smartphones for their service, but rather offers devices that enable devices to use their data plans, such as a mi-fi mobile hotspot, a USB dongle, a home broadband router, an LTE clip for tablets, a 4G iPod Sleeve, and a 4G iPhone 4/4S Sleeve, which is currently waiting FCC approval. The funds raised by FreedomPop will be focused towards adding new features to their service rather than developing much more hardware, according to SlashGear.