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 to sell them phone minutes in a big scale. "Roman is flying high", said my contact about Jajah co-founder Roman Scharf. "He is moving on Tier 1 carrier level and wants to have his part of the phone card business." A similar impression I got from my interview in Barcelona.

Roman tells that so many new users are signing up to the the company's latest callthrough service, Jajah Direct, that there has to be a shift in business. After beta testing the service in Germany, UK, USA and Austria there will be a big rollout in 30 to 50 countries. In some weeks we should see it in every European country. Jajah Direct assigns local numbers from your country to contacts abroad for cheap phone calls over the internet. People can save a lot on international phone calls. That's why the Swedish company Rebtel had invented the same business model yet two years before, as they point out in their blog. "With Jajah Direct we found a way to make VoIP as easy as a normal phone call: dial a number, press the call button and start to talk", says Roman Scharf. Even his grandmother in Austria has a number in Salzburg that she can call to make his office phone in the US ring.

The technical part is tricky because Jajah relies on shared phone numbers. "We can serve millions of customers with just 99 numbers per country", says Roman. Therefor Jajah has to know the caller's number. Users have to tell their home, office and mobile numbers before they can assign up to 99 consecutive Jajah numbers to their contacts from abroad. Jajah knows that when caller A dials number B he has to be redirected to number C abroad. Another caller, D, who calls the same number B, will be connected to number E. Only anonymous callers, who don't transmit their phone numbers, can't take part in this game.

Roman sees Jajah Direct as great chance to grow dynamically in the important telecommunications markets. About the companies former flagship service, which relies on callback, he now says that it's only useful for people sitting in front of their computers. With just one click on the Jajah button in Outlook or the browser you can start a call. "Other technologies we have also tried, like Java or Symbian software or SMS bridges, were too different from normal telephony", says Roman. Too few people installed an extra software on their cell phones for international calls.

Also the telephony backend has its quirks, Jajah had to learn. When the company was young they didn't have own networks and had to send all traffic to wholesalers, always chosing the most competitive offer. Until Jajah learned that this was an Achilles' heel. They just couldn't guarantee for voice quality, but customers expected their calls to sound like normal phone connections. Also the price margins were razor thin for Jajah. "That's why we started to build up our own infrastructure at the beginning of 2007", says Roman. "You will hear a lot about it in the next weeks and months."

According to his plans, other Internet companies, competing VoIP services, cable TV providers and incumbent phone companies will realize that this infrastructure doesn't have to be only useful to Jajah, but also to them. Roman says that Jajah is already terminating international calls for a Canadian telco company. With two big US cable companies they have similar contracts. "We are negotiating with seven or eight big European players", he says. "We have the most interesting infrastructure of the industry", touts the Austrian high flyer. Then he explains how Jajah can power even the most outdated fixed line phone systems, every kind of mobile phone network (GSM, CDMA, UMTS) and the latest freaky services like Emobile's data only cell phones. They don't even have a voice channel, but the Japanese users can make cheap VoIP calls over SIP with a preinstalled Jajah client.

Labels: Jajah, Mobile VoIP, Rebtel, VoIP

                                      

In the last weeks I received many messages from people who want to start a lawsuit against the VoIP company Betamax from Cologne, Germany. They feel betrayed by the mothership of Voipstunt, Voipcheap, Sparvoip, Lowratevoip, Nonoh and other offers. Something must have gone wrong with their billing or they believe that Betamax wrongfully charged too much. Aside from the problem that Betamax themselves are apparently victim of a scam, I can only say that for me everything works flawlessly. But I get the impression that many users don't understand the company's Terms of Service. This morning a Betamax user called Robert wrote:

The company I work for happens to be in Moscow so I call them regularly. Why do they suddenly want to charge me for these calls? It doesn't make any difference whether I call the U.S.A., Italy or Russia. They are all free and perhaps I call Moscow three times a day but perhaps twice a week.

I told him to first look at the website http://backsla.sh/betamax. There you can always see the latest prices and you will realize that with most Betamax companies you can call Russia's landline phones for free, within a Fair Use Policy (FUP) of 300 minutes per week. This FUP seems very fair to me. I never exceed it, so Betamax' normally works like a flatrate for me.

In fact I am very surprised about their cheap prices for Russia, because I know that connections outside of St. Petersburg and Moscow are very expensive to buy in wholesale markets. Therefore e. g. Rebtel users have to pay $0.019 Cents to Moscow and St. Petersburg landlines - but $0.079 Cents to other Russian cities. So Betamax' $0.00 Cent is a great bargain. For the German company it makes a big price difference whether they terminate calls in the U.S.A., Italy or in Russia. Although it might be difficult to explain to the average user like Robert.

Now I see that calls, which were originally free, are now being charged under the 'fair use policy'. This I don't understand.

There can be two reasons for that:

1.) Robert calls for more then 300 minutes per week.

2.) He shares his IP number with other users, so that Betamax thinks that it's only one user. That's what happened at Voxalot, a virtual internet PBX: All Voxalot users had the same IP number to Betamax. Therefore they jointly exceeded the FUP very fast. Voxalot managed to strike an agreement with Betamax to pass the original IP number, so that every user now has his own FUP.

So, if Betamax charges for actual free calls, there might be a technical problem. Otherwise it seems a great bargain to me to get 1.200 minutes per month from Betamax for just €2.50. (Taking into account that that you have to pay €10 every four months to get the €0.00 to Russian landlines.) People should also consider what user satphoneguy wrote in Voxalot's forum:

having lived in many parts of the world I think that a lot of what is happening is relate to cultural differences and expectation of customer service. from what i have read the vast majority of complaints are coming from the USA. here in the USA it is somewhat expected that if you are unhappy with a service or feel deceived by misleading marketing that you should be eligible for refund on what you spent. most American companies do indeed give 100% refunds to their customers no questions asked when they complain. i do know from having lived overseas that is not the business etiquette everyplace. there are a number of reasons why many people may feel deceived since the betamax 'fair use policies' are not very clear. in particular concerning additional charges for use of SIP devices on some services. it is all exasperated in that americans also feel that every company should have a customer service line where they can call with questions(or complaints) or at very least email support with a quick turnaround to response(same day)

i do have to say though that it seems many people who complain about numerous betamax companies continue to try the others. this is very similar to what i dealt with working for a very large retail company - some of the biggest complainers and returners of products for refunds were also some of the biggest shoppers; i would see them on nearly a daily basis.

i personally have never had a billing issue with betamax. although in recent months my only funded account is nonoh; since the rates are so much less for the mobile destinations that i call than with any of the SIP options and i have unlimited calls to NA and most landlines through another provider.

Many people in Europe accept a lousy service, as long as it's cheap. But others expect a great service although they pay nearly nothing. That's just not possible to deliver for a company. Good service always has its price, especially in a country with sky-high wages like Germany. People who want more than just plain phone minutes should subscribe to companies like PhoneGnome, Packet8 or Sipgate which have real hotlines by phone and email for their clients. That's what I also told Robert, who finally admitted:

I suppose, like most people, I never fully read the 'Terms of Use', although in these terms there is no exact reason mentioned and more than that, there is no exact time limit per country or city mentioned where this might be relatively easy as an adder to the price information.

Please always have a look at the small print at the end of every Betamax web page!

* Max 300 minutes per week of free calls, measured over the last 7 days and per unique IP address. Unused free minutes cannot be taken to the following week(s). If limit is exceeded the normal rates apply. With your FREE DAYS you can call for free to all the destinations listed as free! When you have no FREE DAYS left the normal rates apply. You can get extra Freedays by buying credit

They say it very clear that free calls are limited to 300 minutes per week and IP address. That's not too difficult to understand, isn't it? What still remains a mistery to me, is the sentence „When you have no FREE DAYS left the normal rates apply“.

What are these normal rates after 300 minutes? I couldn't find them either.

Labels: Betamax, Packet8, PhoneGnome, Rebtel, Sipgate, VoIP, Voxalot

                                      

Jon Arnold has updated his very interesting portal website IP Convergence TV. This time I also wrote a guest opinion, because to make money from mobile VoIP companies have to accept certain realities: "WiFi isn't everywhere and callback costs double".

I love the mobile use of VoIP but I still find it quite uncomfortable. That's what I point out. Especially annoying is how Skype, Fring, Truphone and other SIP based VoIP services get blocked by German 3G providers. Sorry, Dean Bubley from Disruptive Analysys! The reality looks much darker for VoIPo3G than you predict for the future. (But thanks for your regular Google ads "3G mobile Voice over IP. Analyst report: is it a threat to carriers? Or a future opportunity?". I better put a direct link to your website.)

Mobile VoIP over Wifi works only at home or in the office where I don't need it. So in my guest opinion I advocate intelligent cell phone software which automatically completes calls as callback, callthrough, Vo3G or VoWifi while the user doesn't even notice. I have already installed an example software on a Nokia E61.

Maybe if more and more people use these options, Dean's dream will come true. If everyone uses only mobile callthrough, triggered by intelligent software on the handset, the mobile network operators cannot charge any other items than the tariff's included minutes for local calls. Their voice legacy cell phone networks would become dumb pipes into the internet, the way we already see it with the 3Skypephone or iSkoot, Ringfree, Mobivox, Jajah Direct, Sipbroker, Tpad, Rebtel, Mobiletalk, etc. If mobile operators wanted to charge for international calls at all, they would have to embrace VoIPo3G and could at least charge for data, the way Dean predicts it.

But until this comes true, the mobile VoIP companies should attack the incumbents with better callthrough options, to take more and more cell phone calls out of the traditional networks and into IP. Read the full text for further explanations!

Labels: 3G, 3Skypephone, Fring, Iskoot, Jajah, Mobile, Mobile VoIP, Mobiletalk, Mobivox, Nokia, OpenMoko, Rebtel, Ringfree, SIP, Sipbroker, Skype, Tpad, Truphone, VoIP, VoIPo3G

                                      

There are Copycats wherever you look. Smith on VoIP today criticizes that "Rebtel Borrows Iotum’s Idea; Now Offers Facebook Conferencing App", while Rebtel themselves feel copied by Jajah Direct:

We want to tip our hat to our friends at Jajah for the introduction of Jajah Direct. Those folks have done a brilliant job at making something that Rebtel has been doing from the start sound brand new and innovative.

What I’m talking about is free or low-cost international calls without the need for Internet access. Or said another way: Rebtel service as it’s been from day No.1.

And while we’ve always thought our service was innovative, it’s super nice when you get validation from a competitor that you really did break new ground and that all the other ways of making a VoIP calls are “old school.”

When I received today the following announcement from Tringme, I couldn't but wonder: Don't I know this story from somewhere else? Then I realized that it was Buzzword Bingo time again. While Tringme recently got great publicity for their Flash based click to call widgets, some days later Ribbit took it all away by also presenting Flash apps and additionally alleging to be Silicon Valley's first Phone Company.

At the core of Ribbit's technology is the Ribbit SmartSwitch™, a sophisticated multi-protocol soft-switch that bridges the worlds of traditional telephony with next generation networks and protocols.

Ribbit is an open platform for telephony innovation. Unlike any other phone company, we are giving our developers unprecedented access to our technology, through the Ribbit API and allowing them to innovate at will. Our business is built more like a software company than a phone company.

Now Tringme announces the "Tringswitch" which sounds quite similar to me. Both products promise to fulfil every VoIP necessity. But nobody has seen them yet in public. Bingo!



TringSwitch Launch and Demo at HeadStart.in

Dear TringMe User,

First of all, we wish you all a very happy 2008!!

Life at TringMe continues to march at a fast pace and we wanted to share some recent developments with you.

Very soon, we will officially launch TringMe's platform server - TringSwitch. TringSwitch is a highly reliable and real-time platform optimized for web-based telephony applications. It's the core back-end of TringMe widgets and is now available for others to build interesting and innovative applications on it. TringSwitch can be integrated with any telephony back-end including SIP server, PSTN gateways, SMS gateways etc. TringSwitch can be used within an enterprise infrastructure setup or can be used for consumer facing web-based applications.

TringMe's Mobile VoIP client can be easily configured without downloading anything. We can remotely configure your mobile to use TringMe by merely sending you a special SMS. This is a novel way for a user to start using the mobile device without having to spend any time configuring the device settings for using TringMe. Alternately, you can also download TringMe’s Symbian client (which will be available soon) from our website to enable Mobile VoIP on your Mobile and leverage additional functionality (e.g. sending an SMS over IP) from it.

With Mobile VoIP support, using your mobile, you can connect to your friends not just on landlines and cellular device, but also on IMs like Gtalk. Essentially, all termination points that are accessible by TringMe widgets from a PC are available via Mobile VoIP as well. This has been one of the key requests from many users of TringMe and hence we are extremely delighted to provide the same.

We also added speech recognition (ASR) capability in TringSwitch thereby making it convenient for TringMe users to initiate voice-based actions. New innovative applications like voice-enabled yellow page, voice enabled vertical searches, interactive games etc can be developed quickly with TringSwitch with almost no effort or coding.

We are very happy to announce that TringMe was selected as one of the companies which should demonstrate it's capabilities at HeadStart (http://www.headstart.in) which is going to be held from Jan 18th to Jan 20th in IISc, Bangalore, India. If you are attending HeadStart, please stop by for our demo. We will demonstrate TringSwitch including TringMe's Mobile VoIP capabilities. We will also show how to develop a rapid prototype application using TringSwitch and Speech Recognition in merely a few minutes without any coding efforts.

We look forward to seeing you at Headstart and thanks again for your continued support and suggestions. Write to us: bizdev@tringme.com


Feel free to let us know if you need any assistance.

Regards,
TringMe Support
http://www.tringme.com/

Labels: Jajah, Rebtel, Ribbit, Tringme, VoIP

                                      

You know that I bashed Facebook very hard for being a terrible time sucker. Many Web 2.0 applications need too much attention, compared to their value. But there are some utilizations that make me smile, because the unleash the potential of Web 2.0 without wasting my precious time and money. Like Voxalot's latest Facebook application, VoxCall for Facebook, that really disrupts telecommunications. It let's me make free phone calls without touching the PSTN. Read the announcement:

On Monday 19th Nov 2007 Voxalot will be officially launching our new social communications application for Facebook called VoxCall.

VoxCall is an exciting new initiative from Voxalot that allows Facebook users to click on their friends and initiate phone calls. The beauty of VoxCall is that it is self-organising in that if your VoxCall friend changes their contact phone number, you don't even have to be notified... VoxCall will use whatever number they have registered.

VoxCall also offers both public and private chat rooms where VoxCall friends can get together for a group discussion.

The underlying technology that VoxCall uses to connect calls is Voice over IP addresses (often known as SIP URIs). When you add the VoxCall application, you will be prompted to enter your SIP URI. To ensure that you are the rightful owner of that number, VoxCall will display a PIN number on the screen and then call the number you entered. Your phone will ring and you will be prompted to enter the PIN, which is validated.

As such, VoxCall supports calls between friends that belong to *any* "open" voice network (not just Voxalot).

The beauty is that VoxCall uses VoIP without touching the PSTN. My buddies just enter their SIP URI and I can call them with just one click in Facebook. When they change their SIP address I don't have to bother to update my data since their Facebook button stays the same. We stay connected for free from SIP to SIP.

I find this much more nifty than the Facebook apps from Jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr, Rebtel, IVR Technologies, iotum, Sitófono or Grandcentral. They also connect people on Facebook and let them call me for free, in most cases. But there is always a telephone number involved, so that someone has to pay an incumbent telco which provides them.

Labels: Facebook, Grandcentral, iotum, Jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr, PSTN, Rebtel, SIP, Sitňfono, VoIP, Voxalot, Voxcall, Web_2.0

                                      

VoIP callback service provider Jajah has cancelled their IPO for 2007, an idea they first communicated to my fellow Berlin journalist Thomas Ramge in his interview for the German economy feature magazine Brand Eins. When they met in December 2006, Jajah's co-founder Roman Scharf told Ramge that the company would go public at the end of 2007. The year is nearly over and Scharf now had to correct the story a tiny bit in an interview he had on wednesday with Reuters on wednesday, November 7 2007, postponing the IPO for nearly a year.

NEW YORK, Nov 7 (Reuters) - Internet-based phone company Jajah Inc aims to go public in the second or third quarter next year to expand its low-cost calling service globally, co-founder Roman Scharf said in an interview on Wednesday.

Too bad that the Reuters reporter Ritsuko Ando is no frequent reader of Brand Eins or GigaOM and missed a much more juicy story, which Om Malik puts in the right words for us:

Jajah’s Hypothetical IPO Delayed Another Year

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.

Scharf says that they would need $100 million to $200 million to bring Jajah within a year to a level of 50 to 80 million customers. That would be the purpose of a possible IPO. "We want to do this next year. We believe the second or third quarter next year might have the right environment for us to go public."

These numbers are very humble, compared to the evaluation of 2.9 billion dollars which RRS Capital Strategies Services from Vienna credited them as "fair value" in May 2007 after the investments by Deutsche Telekom and Intel. They deducted this virtual price from Jajah's user data and the conditions under which Skype had been sold to Ebay in 2005. As we know Skype's value has fallen by $1.43 billion and this is also affects the valuation of other internet phone companies.

Until now only stock holders of Jajah's investor Qino Flagship could have fun with the company. Qino Flagship is publicly listed and the only stock trading possibility to participate in Jajah's success. Since June Qino's value has fallen from €15 to €10.

But still the carpetbaggers are sucking up every Jajah news, no matter how goofy it is. In the web forum of the Austrian magazine Börse Express they try to construe even the slightest Jajah move. Obviously they are happy about the new business model: in-call advertising as an opt-in solution. Users listen to an audio ad before every phone call and receive Jajah minutes in exchange. 50 per cent of the advertising revenue gets the user and the rest shares Jajah with the phone company, explained the other Jajah founder, Daniel Mattes, in an interview with the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

"JAJAH's patent pending in-call advertising platform turns the inventory of the world's telephone calls into an advertising market place", said Mattes in the German press release. "Google paved the way around a decade ago with Google AdWords. Their approach was revolutionary, as they respected the users' common sense and reactions. We are now trying to do the same for the massive amount of phone call inventory. Think AdWords for the phone", he says in English.

Comparing oneself to Google is always a great way to get publicity. Does anybody remember when it was cool to sell a company as "future Microsoft"? Although Jajah has filed a patent application they are not the first with such an idea. The Rebtel clone Talkster also plays 10 second ads before every call. And Californian Pudding Media even wants to eavesdrop conversations to deliver targeted advertising during their free phone calls.

Labels: free phone calls, Jajah, Rebtel, Talkster, VoIP

                                      

That was a funny to read yesterday: VoIP guru Jeff Pulver published the manifesto "Social Communications. A way of Life for me.", stating that "advent of Social Media provides us all with a great set of online tools we can use to build friendships and conduct business". He tells how he feels connected with hundreds of friends and collaborators without the need to ever meet the person face-to-face and declares 2007 as his year when social media extended itself into his life and changed everything.

Sometime during 2007, with the advent of my discovery/obsession with twitter and my recent adoption of Facebook as my iHome, the result of my actions have accelerated the way I have been able to create new relationships with people. These are people whom I've never met, yet over time people whom I feel truly connected with. And I would include in this list some of the people whose blogs I read as well as some of the people who have taken the time to leave a comment on my blog and whom I got to know afterwards.

The text ends with an invitation to join him on Facebook and Twitter, where we can read important information like "Good morning! Looks like a great day. I just hope the weather stays like this for my drive/ferry/drive to Boston on Thursday." or "Jeff is sleeping and dreaming about Jerusalem ROCKS!".

I nearly cracked up laughing when directly afterwards I read the post "Facebook Crap" on the Wireless Utopia blog. The writer Rajiv, a programmer from Bangalore, came straight to the point:

I finally have to admit it: I have not been able to figure out Facebook. No, not their business model. But what to do with it. I am on it and so are a decent amount of friends. But I hardly ever go beyond the home page. I see all my friends adding all sorts of applications, running quizzes, giving each other gifts, reading fortune cookies and whatnot. They seem to be having a good time.

But somehow I fail to enjoy it. None of the apps are really interesting. Or useful. To be frank, some of them are downright childish. Fortune cookies, comparing likes and dislikes. Who has the time for these things.

You are so right Rajiv! I feel the same. Facebook is a great time sucker.

On purpose I made there only "friends" who should be serious people: CEOs, CTOs, analysts, investors, sales people, journalists. I hoped to get in interesting discussions and to learn something. But what do I see? Messages like "Andy Abramson is going to dinner, about to drink wine..." or adult people pretending to be Zombies and virtually bite each other.

The groups, where we could have discussions, are barely updated with new posted items or wall posts. Even the page of the Rebtel group, with 153 members, didn't change in the last 12 days. Other groups that sounded interesting (EQO Mobile, Jajah, Ooma, FWD, ...) didn't develop further than some introductory statements.

Twitter is worse because it's only silly personal status messages. Have fun to read Jeff Pulver saying mostly "Good morning" and talking about the wheather on his Twitter page.

Who needs this? I wonder what Jeff Pulver would say.


UPDATE:

Reuters: Facebook surfers cost their bosses billions
Mon Aug 20, 2007 6:29AM EDT

Labels: EQO Mobile, Facebook, FWD, Jajah, Ooma, Rebtel, Twitter, Web_2.0

                                      

... says the Rebtel blog and criticizes the decision to disable VOIP on the iPhone.

iPhone buyers get a beautiful machine that’s horribly crippled by the stranglehold AT&T now seems to have on Apple.

It’s also a good demonstration of how the telephony market works: handset manufacturers and operators are in the same bed, and that means that we, their customers, are being deprived of functionality that could be ours if only….

Once VOIP handsets become available, users of mobile services will be able to band together and circumvent mobile protocols altogether. It’s only a matter of time before the first VOIP enabler hacks appear for the iPhone.

I am already waiting for that inevitable development. And as I said already in April: The standardization of VoIP in SIP has opened a Pandora's box for all telecommunication companies. With SIP you can tie every phone system together. More and more bridges are being built to make free phone calls and circumvent paid networks. Voice will become "just another application" like email, as techies use to say.

Labels: iPhone, Rebtel, VoIP