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How to save money on phone calls when traveling

Om Malik — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 15:09:22 +0000

If you are someone who is always on the move and spends a lot of time on the phone, then those phone bills stack up. In this age of mobile VoIP that shouldn’t be the case, but it does. This infographic from Essential Travel magazine will get you started. (hat tip, Andy Abramson.)

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O2/Telefónica Buys Jajah for $207M

Om Malik — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:14:41 +0000

Telefónica, the parent company of O2, today announced the acquisition of Jajah for €145 million (about $207 million) in an all-cash transaction. The company had raised $35 million from various investors including Deutsche Telekom, Intel Capital and Sequoia Capital. The rumors of this deal emerged earlier this month. You can read my post, “Why O2 Wants to Buy Jajah,” to get a better understanding of the deal.

Matthew Key, chairman and CEO of Telefónica Europe, said in a press statement: “The acquisition of Jajah broadens the scope of our communications offering and opens up new capabilities in the voice communication space.” Jajah will continue to operate as a standalone brand, reporting to Telefónica Europe, which will offer Jajah services to its customers.

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Latest on O2-Jajah Deal: Not Done Yet

Om Malik — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:38:02 +0000

Yesterday, rumors were flying that O2, a division of Telefonica, a large Spanish phone company, was buying Israel-based VoIP company Jajah for about $200 million. Last night I explained that it’s actually a good idea for O2 to buy the upstart, mostly because it (and its parent) have the scale to leverage Jajah’s virtual network and platform.

Of course when I heard about the rumor, I reached out to sources in Israel. When I woke up this morning, I’d heard back from them with new information: first of all, the deal isn’t done just yet. And according to my Israeli grapevine, the price is not $200 million and might be north of $100 million. I will keep you posted.

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Why O2 Wants to Buy Jajah

Om Malik — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 04:34:40 +0000

O2, a division of Telefonica, a Spanish telecommunications company, is in talks to acquire Jajah, a VoIP startup, for about $200 million, Reuters reported today. The company had raised $35 million from various investors including Deutsche Telekom, Intel Capital and Sequoia Capital. According to some rumors, Microsoft and Cisco Systems were also bidding for Jajah, which has had its shares of ups and downs.

The company is over 4 years old and started out as a wannabe Skype killer that offered cheap calls. It tried to do everything — partners with media companies offer cheaper plans, but it never really got the traction it needed to kill Skype. Even today Jajah has only about 25 million subscribers who use its Internet phone service for placing dirt-cheap calls across the globe. In comparison, Skype has over half a billion users.

However, Jajah’s struggles didn’t prevent it from building its own virtual network with special VoIP servers across the planet, connected through leased fiber connections. It also connects with various PSTN networks (see map). Think of it as a virtual global phone company that allows it to route calls from one place, say New York, to another like Shanghai, at ultra-low prices.

Jajah also has built a software layer that can be used to offer add-on applications such as click-to-call to wholesale customers. The company’s platform not only marries web with voice, but also provides vital features such as real-time billing. This approach struck a chord both with tiny startups and large companies like Yahoo and AOL.

For O2/Telefonica, it makes perfect sense to buy a service such as Jajah. Some reasons I can think of just off the bat:

Cheap international calling plans are a way to retain/attract new customers. Telefonica has a strong presence in Latin America, and Jajah’s network can be a good way to increase its share of voice minutes.
Jajah’s VoIP platform can be used to essentially turn O2 into a long-distance voice company.
Like BT which bought Ribbit, O2 could rethink its approach to the voice business and start focusing on how it can marry voice with web/mobile apps.
These mobile applications could then leverage not only Jajah’s platform but also O2’s next-generation wireless broadband networks that use Long-Term Evolution (LTE) technology.

If you have additional thoughts on why O2 should buy this company, let us know. I obviously think it’s a good idea, but if you have a counterargument, I’d love to hear it.

Photo of Jajah at eComm 09 by James Duncan Davidson for Jajah via Flickr

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StatShot: 27% Access Twitter Via Apps

Jennifer Martinez — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 04:00:11 +0000

Twitter-focused applications are sprouting up everywhere these days — among them TweetDeck, Twhirl and Kutano — and they’re proving to be popular. Some 27 percent of Twitter users said they primarily access the micromessaging network using such apps, according to an inaugural study released today by Crowd Science, a technology research company.

Among some of the other notable findings in the study: Four in 10 Twitter users said they prefer contacting friends using social media than over the phone (which could either hurt or help Jajah’s @Call offering, which uses the company’s VoIP service to let users call friends for free via the Twitter network.) And in line with previous results from the Harvard Business School, the study found that on a daily basis, only a quarter of Twitter users tweet while 46 percent check status updates. Additionally, 24 percent of registered Twitter users have either stopped tweeting since they first signed up or have never tweeted at all.

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Jajah Lets You Make Calls via Twitter

Jennifer Martinez — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:16:38 +0000

Jajah is privately launching in beta today a voice-over-IP solution that lets people make calls for free via micromessaging site Twitter and other Twitter-related desktop and mobile applications. This is another effort by Jajah to get its VoIP service onto a popular application; last year, the company forged a partnership with Yahoo to offer its voice services to Yahoo IM users.

When 140 characters isn’t cutting it, simply send a tweet to the person you want to talk to using the format “@call @username.” Jajah will then call your phone and once you pick up, will connect you to your friend. To use Jajah’s @Call service, however, both you and your friend must be registered in the company’s beta group and the person you’re calling must follow you on Twitter. For now, calls can only be two minutes long and only U.S. numbers are supported. Jajah keeps users’ phone numbers private, so you don’t have to worry about anyone getting their hands on personal contact information. The @Call service is compatible with a host of Twitter applications, including Seesmic, Echofon (formerly Twitterfon) and Twitroid.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Jajah isn’t the only company to bring VoIP to a social site. Earlier this week, Vivox privately launched in beta a web voice service for Facebook that lets people have a voice chat with any of their friends on the social network. Users have to download a plug-in to use the service.

The launch of these voice services for social networks have generated a healthy amount of buzz on the web, and only time will tell whether Twitter and Facebook will embed them into their platforms. While these click-to-call services aren’t the sexiest of applications, they’re useful and continue to encourage us to live our social lives on the web.

Image courtesy of Jajah

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Why IntelePeer Snagged $18 Million in Funding

Om Malik — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:37:44 +0000

IntelePeer is one of those startups that has little buzz but a lot of traction. Formerly known as VoEx, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company lacks the hype around, say, Ribbit, but it has been delivering on the Voice 2.0 promise of integrating voice with web and enterprise applications for a long time. And doing well — IntelePeer turned EBITDA positive in June and is on its way to revenues that will exceed $50 million in 2009.

That is one of the reasons the company was able to snag $18 million in Series C funding from Vantage Point Partners and previous investors including Kennet Venture Partners, NorthCap Partners and EDF Ventures. The new round is incredible because of its timing — though I am betting that the new investors are looking at the $105 million Ribbit exit and letting their imagination run wild. But then there aren’t many suckers like BT around anymore! The company has raised (including this round) a total of $35.5 million since its inception in 2003.

Thanks to its own voice peering fabric, IntelePeer is on its way to doing close to 7 billion minutes of voice traffic this year, Chairman and CEO Frank Fawzi told me yesterday. “We are a lot larger than Ribbit and Jajah by multiple times,” Fawzi quipped. Jajah is heading down the same path at IntelePeer and the two companies are poised to become fierce competitors — that is if Jajah makes it out on the other end of this downturn.

So why does IntelePeer need the money? “We only just turned EBDITA positive and we need to support our expansion,” Fawzi claimed. Of course, I never expected him to say that he was buying insurance — his investors wouldn’t like that. Plus, it’s prudent to take this money right now. As we all know, downturns are as unpredictable as the tornadoes in the Midwest — and leave just as much destruction in their wake.

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Intel's Remote Wake Gives PCs a Super Poke

Om Malik — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:40:12 +0000

It isn’t quite earth-shattering, but Intel is introducing a technology that could make computers more useful. The company has developed ways to power up PCs remotely, allowing people to, say, retrieve files, according to the Wall Street Journal. Intel calls this Remote Wake, and it will work on forthcoming desktops with a new chipset that will have the new software embedded in the memory. Apparently, this will be much easier to use than the current options.

Intel is working with Jajah, CyberLink, Orb Networks and Pando Networks. Because of Remote Wake, a PC will also be able to make and receive calls over the JAJAH network and wake up from sleep mode to receive a call. This is improvement over the current scenario, where you can’t quite use your PC as your phone, because when it’s in sleep mode, you miss the calls. Pando’s service could deliver video at a dedicated time to a PC after waking it up remotely, an option that could make Pando quite viable as a desktop-oriented content delivery network.

If you are an expert on remote access and have some opinions about Remote Wake, please share your opinions with us.

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SIPphone Makes The Call To Jajah

Om Malik — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:19:35 +0000

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.

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Jajah Gives Yahoo Voice, AOL Wants Others to SIP AIM Voice

Om Malik — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 04:47:06 +0000

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.

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A Mobile VoIP Forecast & What's Up With Jajah, Raketu & mig33

Om Malik — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 05:00:47 +0000

Mobile VoIP is going to become a major force over the next five years, rapidly outpacing voice over Wi-Fi, according to a recently released report by research firm Disruptive Analysis. The report predicts that the number of VoIP over 3G users will top 250 million by the end of 2012 — from virtually zero in 2007. The caveat, of course, is if carriers allow it. If T-Mobile’s recent fracas with Truphone is any indication, the carriers are worried about VoIP over 3G.

* mig33, a mobile communications service provider, is adding over 20,000 users a day and now has eight million subscribers. The company is adding new features and slowly becoming a mobile social network. And as they get their makeover, Jajah is adding a new service that reminds me of the old mig33, Rebtel and Talkplus.

* Jajah’s new service, called Jajah Direct, will allow you to make international calls for free or at local rates. Go to the their Local Access Number web site, enter the international number you want to call and get connected. After your first call, you will receive a unique local number for each of your contacts that you can store in your phone or address book for future dialing.

Jajah’s Frederik Hermann just emailed and said that “you never have to be online to sign up for JAJAH Direct, you can sign up over the phone and manage your account from there. We will give out the local access number to our premier target groups, immigrants and expats on a flyer and they can go from there, no Internet access needed.”

* ~~Jajah’s service needs at least one-time access to a PC.~~ Raketu~~, by comparison,~~ recently introduced an SMS-based VoIP callback service. You send an SMS message to a local number and include in the message the number you want to dial; N.Y.-based Raketu then calls you and connects you to the number you are trying to reach.

The funny thing is that despite all these service, the calling-card business isn’t taking a nosedive. I guess the people that most need to shave pennies off their phone bills — primarily immigrants — find it’s easier to just buy their minutes in $10 increments from the corner store.

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Jajah, Jangl Team Up. No Not Like That

Om Malik — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 15:45:56 +0000

Back in 2006 a whole crop of VoIP app companies cropped up, each one trying to figure out how they can make a business out of voice, including in-fashion, if pointless forays such as embeddable widgets for social networks. One had to look really hard to find any difference. Their record so far is no different than that of baseball team, Tampa Bay Rays.Things are no different for those who are chasing Facebook elixir.

At least two of the companies are coming to their senses, and teaming up to focus on what they are good at: Jajah on its telephony platform and Jangl on social apps. As part of the deal, Jangl will start using Jajah’s telephony infrastructure, long distance and click-to-call features. Jangl, on the other hand will focus on developing social apps using voice, including some new services for its customers in the online dating business.

“We were going to build a click-to-call service, but since they already have that, and a billing infrastructure, it makes sense to partner with them,” said Michael Cerda, CEO of Jangl. He was candid and admitted that focusing “on stuff that a company is not good at can prove to be distracting and counterproductive.”

* Will dirty talk boost VoIP apps.
* Jangl Coverage
* Jajah Coverage

Disclosure: Jangl is an advertiser on The GigaOM Show.

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Jajah's Hypothetical IPO Delayed Another Year

Om Malik — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:08:19 +0000

Jajah, the VoIP callback service provider that shifted from paid to “free” and was dreaming of an initial public offering in 2007, has pushed back its IPO plans until the second or third quarter of 2008, co-founder Roman Scharf told Reuters. The timing seems about right — the way everyone is going nuts here in the Valley, profitless IPOs could make a solid return by the middle of next year. (Too bad eBay already made its play with Skype.) Scharf said that it would take between $100 million and $200 million to attract 50 to 80 million Jajah users. “When something crashes in the Valley, it crashes really hard,” he said. Yeah, like the dreams of an IPO. Jajah has received funding from Sequoia Capital, Intel Capital and Globespan Partners.

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