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Jajah, in its effort to become a backend platform for VoIP services, has started offering call termination, billing and other such services to one and all comers. They got a big boost when they signed up Yahoo! Now, the Sequoia Capital-backed company has signed up SIPphone, the company behind Gizmo and will handle their call termination. Does this mean Gizmo’s call quality will increase? I certainly hope so - I have stopped using the service because of poor quality of voice.

Instead, I have opted for RingCentral, which recently introduced a Mac OS X soft client (in addition to a PC version) and it is doing a might fine job for me. I was highly skeptical of RingCentral in the past but they have won me over with their high quality service. (Full review, pending!)

Soft phones - whether they are from RingCentral, Vonage, Gizmo or Skype extremely useful. I almost never am close to a landline, but an internet connection is always handy. Using soft phone, I can make quick calls without really breaking away from the computer screen. I am not alone in professing a liking for Softphones. A Frost & Sullivan report says that as a percentage of total IP-telephone market soft phones share will increase from 5 percent to 20 percent by 2014. Softphone sales rose to 416,000 units, worth $18.9 million in 2007, up 30% over 2006.

Session initiation protocol-compatible VoIP devices already account for as much as 20 percent of landline telephone traffic, thanks to the efforts of companies like Cisco, which sells to enterprises, and Comcast (in the U.S.) or Free (in France), which target consumers. Mobile telephones will not remain a safe haven for long, however, as more companies like Fring and Truphone start to offer VoIP alternatives to operator voice plans.

Such plans involve downloaded SIP User Agent software that can also voice-enable gadgets like the Nintendo DS, Sony PSP or iPod Touch. Dan Borislow claims the marketing blitz for his SIP-based magicJack puts him on track to sell 500,000 of the devices by the end of this month. Yet the displacement of analog phones by VoIP devices has not displaced the telephone network itself.

The state of affairs is analogous to printing email before it reaches the destination in order to preserve a role for the post office. It will not last. Continue Reading

The business of providing voice services to users of social networks is a tough one - you need huge volume to basically make money off what is essentially a new age call-back/calling card business. That is why many companies that aimed at this market have either retrenched or gone out of business.

Jaxtr, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based company, on the other hand, is ready to double down and stay in the game. Helping it do so is $10 million in Series B funding from Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, announced this morning.

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Updated: Skype, the peer-to-peer VoIP provider and a division of eBay, wants to grow up – both as a company and as a communications utility. To that end, it is launching the beta version of its latest Skype client software.

Josh Silverman, the company’s new CEO, acknowledged that from a usability standpoint, things hadn’t changed much, even as Skype kept adding more features such as embedding third-party plug-ins. Skype needed a better, easier and cleaner client — and Skype 4.0 beta, likely to be available for download tomorrow, is a start. 

 

The new client is going to cause an uproar amongst many Skype loyalists used to the IM-like nature of the current software. With this version, the software takes up the entire PC desktop screen, mostly to accommodate a growing number of features. (Skype Journal’s Jim Courtney & JKontherun tell me that you can change the screen size, though it isn’t that obvious or easy.) I found it hugely annoying as it forced me to constantly toggle between the client and the desktop; merely doubling or tripling the size of the client seems like it would have sufficed. 

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Rebtel, a London-based VoIP startup, seems to be taking a white-label approach to boost usage of its services. The company will announce a brand license deal with easyGroup, a company started by discount carrier easyJet founder and serial entrepreneur Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou. As part of this deal, easyGroup will sell cheap international calls under the brand name easyMobile.

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While the emergence of VoIP, or voice-over-Internet protocol, technology has already helped push down the cost of making a phone call, now it’s starting to have a deflationary impact on the world of mobile, where call charges remain stubbornly high.

In the meantime, the ongoing adoption of 3G broadband and the inclusion of Wi-Fi in many high-end phones is drawing a growing amount of attention to mobile VoIP services. Indeed, research firm Disruptive Analysis predicts that the number of VoIP-over-3G users will top 250 million by the end of 2012 — from virtually zero in 2007.

We at GigaOM are constantly tinkering with these mobile services, so we’ve put together a list of seven mobile VoIP apps that we think you’ll find handy. Continue Reading