Jajah, one of the many callback service providers, is slowly trying to transform itself into a voice platform, offering others the ability to use its network and back-end billing and fulfillment infrastructure. It struck up a partnership with Jangl back in November 2007. This managed services focus seems to have gotten a big boost, thanks to a deal with Yahoo. Yahoo and Jajah share a common investor: Sequoia Capital.
Jajah co-founder Daniel Mattes tells our friend Alec Saunders that Yahoo will outsource voice services for their 97 million Yahoo IM users to Jajah. Mattes says it now has 10 million users, about 8 million of them joining Jajah over the past 12 months. I guess if you include widget users and people using services on other networks, the 8 million additional Jajah users starts to make sense.
If Yahoo is turning to Jajah for voice on IM, then AOL wants to offer others an ability to integrate AIM Call Out service via its Open Voice APIs into softphones, as well as SIP-enabled hardware and cell phones with Wi-Fi connectivity. AIM Call Out is a pay-as-you-go outbound voice calling service built right into AIM.
Jajah, AOL Open Voice, Ribbit and scores of others are taking a platform approach to VoIP, hoping that adding voice to applications will drive up minute volume and turn them into a viable business.
7 comments so far
10:38 PM PT
Om,
Looks like jajah knows the game well. Others are still trying to build voice widgets, jajah is a step ahead and this is indeed game changer for the company. Iam not sure how authentic the 10 million numbers are. Nevertheless, yahoo outsourcing is one heck of a deal. I guess off late iam hearing most of the companies (ribbit, broadsoft, tringme etc) are jumping into platform game. Iam not sure about the revenue model of supporting voice and messaging platform. With voice widgets failing in most of the social networking. Will enterprise be the next game changer?
On a side note, with this announcement, will we hear the jajah IPO rumors again?
Cheers,
Omfut
1:09 AM PT
Phone company Jajah enters wholesale business…
The VoIP company Jajah is entering more and more markets and now they are gearing towards the wholesale business. That’s what I learned at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress, where I met a company which had been approached by the Austrians who wanted …
7:15 AM PT
I guess more and more VOIP companies are realizing that being only a service provider is a dead end road for there business. Soon we will see many companies jumping into the business of providing VOIP platform.
8:11 AM PT
I think this is a great move by Jajah as well as any of the myriad of VOIP providers. We’re planning to add a VOIP partner to our service to enhance its’ user value, and a partnership between Yahoo and Jajah certainly makes Jajah a highly desirable partner given their potential increase in reach and appeal.
8:47 AM PT
Om, Thanks for including our AOL Voice platform in your blog.
With the launch of our Open Voice program today , we want to embrace the millions customers in the SIP User community along with giving our huge AIM audience options to use their regular phones via TA’s or use IP Phones to call distance & International destinations with AIM Call Out.
We are actively working to test more SIP enabled devices including Open source telephony Platforms with our open sip gateway.
More details can be found here,
http://dev.aol.com/api/aimcall
http://journals.aol.com/opensip/aol-open-voice-platform/
10:09 AM PT
@ Curtis,
I think finally Jajah has found a business model that works and as you say, shows signs of growing to become a big business. what is the reality of this business: it will be a long distance voice carrier from this point forward. not such a bad idea but this is good stuff.
1:29 PM PT
[...] 10 million users that JAJAH announced. It turned out that these were pure JAJAH users, and that buttons and other widgets comprise only a small portion of those 10 million. According to Roman, growth in JAJAH Web and JAJAH Direct has been 600% over the last year. [...]
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