JAJAH now enables most mobile phones to make free global calls. JAJAH will announce on Tuesday their new service which enables consumers to make free or low-cost long distance international calls directly from their cell phone. This extends their previous "free calling", to the mobile phone realm, which was previously only available via a computer browser.
The JAJAH Mobile Suite will allow virtually any mobile phone to make JAJAH calls. JAJAH is starting with Symbian and Java-based J2ME phones and soon will enable text messaging and smart-phone/browser solutions. Between all of these methods, just about any cell phone can use JAJAH. Even Blackberries now work with JAJAH, as I recently reported.
JAJAH mobile is seamlessly integrated into the JAJAH desktop solution allowing consumers to manage their account directly on the JAJAH web site. To use the service, you first need a JAJAH account. To take advantage of JAJAH’s Free Global Calling Plan, it only applies when both call participants are registered JAJAH users. In countries where free phone calls are not available, or if someone is calling a non-JAJAH member, calls are then subject to JAJAH's rates, usually less than 3 cents a minute.
According to Jajah's Frederik Hermann, here's how it works. "In short, you go to the Jajah site, look to see if your phone is currently supported - the first phones supported are Symbian based, like Nokia N70 and Java based such as the Nokia 6630 (J2ME). We are adding phones everyday and the software is done for many phones. If your phone is supported, you pull down a small plugin. Your phone will then know that when you dial an international number, it will send the call through the Jajah "network" (you can change theses preferences if you wish and make only some calls, or all calls, go through Jajah). Regardless, you just dial the number and Jajah makes the call. Thats it. The back end is all integrated with the Jajah system (billing, call history etc.). Basically its the same price structure as with a regular Jajah call - free to other Jajah users etc."
Want to make free phone calls from your Blackberry? Well, there is now a piece of software called BBCalls (Blackberry Calls) that when used in conjunction with Jajah, grants you your "free phone calling wish".
Jajah announced back in June free phone-to-phone calls to almost anywhere. The JAJAH Free Global Calling Plan applies to both landline and mobile phones to many of the most-called places in the world.
JAHJAH uses a unique method of initiating the call. You go to a website, enter in your phone number and the number you wish to dial and JAHJAH dials both legs of the call and connects the two. Free calls from your Blackberry? Sweeet...
Back in March, I had an exclusive first look at Lycos Phone, which is a rebranded softphone client made by Globe7. On Tuesday next week, Globe7 will launch a major new release of their softphone client, though they've quietly made the 3.0 software available for download now. The new version loads much faster, has a complete video library for users and allows users to earn free credits for the phone simply by watching videos. Yep, you read that correctly - you can earn PSTN dialout minutes simply by watching videos. This is the first "earn phone credits" VoIP application. What is important to note is that they are giving credits for watching the video content, not for watching ads or clicking on the ads. I just earned $0.03 for watching 2 videos, including the Pirates of the Caribbean trailer. I calculated that I earned roughly $0.0048 per minute of watching (roughly 1/2 cent per minute).
Here's a demo of the Globe7 softphone client I captured:
In addition to the earned credit feature, Globe7 is offering 1 GB free storage space for video and photos uploading and sharing, breaking news feeds, video streaming, and other features. The product is SIP-based and the codecs they are using VP6 supported by Macromedia Flash player. They are using Akamai solution for streaming all the videos. The audio codecs are ILBC and GSM.
The launch of the 3.0 version coincides with a major marketing push in the U.S. According to Globe7, they will initially be targeting college campuses with campus bookstore promotions in 525 colleges and universities in the U.S., as well as pre-game promotions. That will be followed by events such as concerts for the general public including mobile kiosks where interested folks can check out the voice and video quality of the new application. They will also be targeting communities within major metropolitan area that have a high degree of international phone call usage.
Screenshot of PSTN phone dialing screen
In the next two months, Globe7 will follow in the United States with the launch of its Wi-Fi capable PDA with embedded VoIP. It will be inexpensively priced and will also allow video to be received and to earn credits towards VoIP minutes. They claim that the Globe7 PDA will be priced economically enough for families to afford two PDA's, allowing them to talk PDA to PDA for free. Who needs walkie-talkies? Actually walkie-talkies have a range of 2 miles or more - good for the ski slopes. WiFi doesn't reach quite that far.
Of course, the "pay to watch" model may have some trouble in the VoIP marketplace with several VoIP companies offering free PSTN dialing. For instance, Skype offers free U.S. & Canada calling until the end of the year. Jajah offers free worldwide dialing, and there are a few others.
Of course, at least Globe 7 has a legitimate business model that intends to make a profit by rewarding users for viewing videos and attracting advertisers for the confirmed/tracked eyeballs. How long can the free models be sustained? Some would argue that the race to free calling has begun and it's only a matter of time before ubiquitous free calling takes place. Guess we'll have to wait and see if this "pay to watch content model" works in the VoIP space. Stay tuned...
Gizmo, infact is going one step further and offering free dialing to old-fashioned phone and mobile numbers in 60 countries. When you sign up for Gizmo Project, you fill out your profile and add your work; mobile, and home phone numbers to that profile. These are the numbers that can be called for free.
To be eligible for All Calls Free, users have to log in to their account and make a call using Gizmo Project to attain “active” status. The countries included in this plan are China, the United States, Brazil, Japan, Germany, Thailand, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, South Korea, Spain, Canada, and more. (Sadly, calls to India are not part of the plan, so calling mom is still going to cost a lot of cash. Acceptable expense, I would say!)
This free voice movement had me thinking – what kind of a loss is acceptable to these companies? Though it is hard to get a straight answer, Jajah officials say they can make up all the losses in premium services such as scheduled conference calling, or other such services.
“Wholesale PSTN rates are sooo cheap these days that it’s not much different than the cost of bandwidth back when I started Scour.net,” says Jason Droege, chief executive of SIPphone, the company behind Gizmo Project. “In the last 12 months I’ve seen wholesale PSTN costs drop dramatically and I expect this to continue. ” (I would need to check on that – its almost midnight, so cannot hassle folks at Telegeography just as yet!)
Like Jajah, he believes that there are many other ways to make money off usage here – pay-per-call ads, premium services, calling to non-covered countries, virtual numbers. Still, being a believer in the age-old dictum that there are no free lunches in life, I suspect that many of the VoIP companies (including Skype) are finding that attracting users beyond the early adopter set is hard, and needs major marketing dollars.
FierceVoIP has released a list of their Top 15 VoIP Companies of 2006, which FierceVoIP Editor Dan Rosenbaum calls the Fierce 15.
Dan writes: "I have a particular belief that the companies that will succeed most brilliantly are the ones that succeed in building an ecosystem around themselves, and that brilliant applications are at the forefront of today's VoIP industry…Some of these companies you've heard of. Some, I bet, you haven't. But you should. These are the best of breed for 2006."
It's an interesting list, which includes Empirix, SunRocket, Jajah, Iotum, Digium, GrandCentral, and several other notable players in the VoIP space. Some in the list I agree with, some I don't. It's a pretty short list, so I'm sure narrowing it down to just 15 was tough and as a result some good VoIP players will inevitably be left out in the cold.
Globe Dialer is a proprietary software application that you download directly onto your mobile phone. Their software allows you to make convenient, low-cost, 'one-click' international calls, which no doubt uses VoIP termination. Of course, as I have reported, Jajah offers something similar, and they even offer free worldwide dialing, though there is a catch. Talkplus also offers a mobile app to download, but its primary purpose isn't inexpensive mobile dialing, though that is one of its benefits.
Globe Dialer has no "catch" and it's sole function is inexpensive international calls. The software can be downloaded onto many different phones and if your phone isn't supported, you can still benefit from their low rates by using any of their local or toll-free Direct Dial-In Numbers to call over 220 countries worldwide. Obviously, with the dial-in numbers you can also use their service from a landline phone.
Talkster today announced that their closed/invite-only beta is now open the public. Talkster essentially lets you place free calls from your regular cell phone to instant messaging clients such as MSN Messenger, Google Talk, and Gizmo Project. What's nice about Talkster is you don't have to have a telephone number to reach someone - you simply use their buddy (contact) name. Further, Talkster is convenient because it consolidates 3 popular communications services people and allows you to leverage them to make VoIP calls to any of these services using your mobile phone. In fact, during this now public beta, calls to instant messaging services are free. I talked with James Wanless, president and chief operating officer of Talkster and asked him why Yahoo! Messenger was notably absent since I knew they were SIP-based. James mentioned that Yahoo has put in several security layers to block anyone from connecting to their network. Wasn't Yahoo blocking Trillian and GAIM years ago? They're still playing these stupid games?
I asked about Skype and James acknowledged the importance of Skype and he pointed out that they have a desktop application that would allow you to view the presence of Skype users and make/receive calls. However, he stated, "In terms of providing a service, having to have people run clients on their PC and have to rely on the fact that the PC is always on and hasn't leaked memory or crashed - that's not a good thing. It's really a bad thing. There are some services that have been looking at ways of replicating the desktop environment into a server and run many many Skype clients together, but that still is a really clunky non-scalable way of building out a service. Skype is a company who already has a SIP layer which sits on top of the Skype network. You know when you have SkypeIn and they give you a number, that is coming from a VoIP provider, but they've just chosen not to open it up right now."
I also asked about a native SIP client so there is no need for a callback or dialing into a local gateway and James mentioned that their network can support it today and stated they he was looking forward to the day when these phones support open standards such as SIP and have the added processing horsepower to handle SIP calls. But he also pointed out "Yes it (SIP calls) works when it works, however there are a lot of issues with it disconnecting and not reconnecting."
There are two ways that calls can be connected using Talkster. Most services call you back, however Talkster can also dial a local gateway on an outbound call and then connect you to the far end. This local gateway method is important in Europe where the EU is in the process of regulating the cost of roaming by the Summer of 2007. This will enable a person that is traveling outside their home country to make a call to a local gateway while traveling and the roaming costs will reduced. When someone picks up the phone and goes to another country using Talkster's you can save substantially on the cost of the call. James wrote an interesting blog post on how the new rules will impact VoIP arbitrage.
From the web interface (a fat-client software application will be available next year) you can view the presence for any of your contacts. When you view the details for any of your contacts you have the option to call using four methods, including IM, mobile, PSTN, and VoIP. No doubt comparisons will be made between Talkster and Jajah, Talkplus, or Rebtel. One obvious difference is that Talkster supports both call back and dial-in methods, but another important differentiator is that Talkster is focused on the enterprise market, while the other solutions focus on the consumer market or special verticals such as dating using a second phone number.
The concept of using a person's buddy name instead of their phone number is not new. However, I do like how Talkster consolidates various popular IM platforms. This got me thinking what the future may hold. Right now Talkster, Jajah, Rebtel, Talkplus, and all the other interesting Voice 2.0 providers leverage the existing carrier's infrastructure both for the PSTN and the IP connectivity. The carriers have been slow to adopt Voice 2.0 or provide cool applications to their customers and instead have left it to upstarts. For instance, I can envision AT&T/SBC, which is already a huge Yahoo partner offering similar Voice 2.0 solutions, but in a more integrated fashion, since AT&T/SBC owns their own network. SBC offers packages of local and long distance, Internet, wireless phone and satellite TV (through DISH Network). Add in the fact that they are a Yahoo partner, and I can envision some intriguing Voice 2.0 possibilities. Then again, since when do carriers offer a nice integrated and feature-rich product without charging you an arm and a leg for it.
According to TMCNet.com Skype today announced that it is offering U.S. and Canadian consumers the new Skype Unlimited Calling plan, a paid annual subscription service that allows registered users to make 12 months of unlimited SkypeOut calls to any phone within the U.S. and Canada. This is the first time that Skype is making an annual subscription calling plan available.
The Skype Unlimited Calling plan is available for a flat rate of $29.95 per year. People who sign up for the new plan before January 31, 2007 will receive a special discounted introductory rate of $14.95 per year - 50 percent off the regular price. Sounds like a sweet deal, right? Wrong!
The new pricing plan follows Skype's free SkypeOut promotion in which calls within the US and Canada are free until December 31, 2006. Thus, Skype users that got used to free SkypeOut calls to U.S. and Canadian numbers will be in for a bit of a surprise come January 1st. Ok, maybe not "surprised" since this was a limited promotion, but still perhaps a bit disappointed.
Also, customers who purchase the new Skype Unlimited Calling plan before January 31, 2007 will get a discounted pricing of $14.95, as well as a bonus offer of 100 minutes of SkypeOut credit for making international calls and over $50 in discount coupons for purchasing Skype-certified hardware products.
Does Skype's move from "free" U.S./Canada calling open the door for a competitor to offer free calling and take some of Skype's market share? Certainly companies like Jajah, Raketu, and others already offer free calling. What do you think?
This morning Jajah launched an all new Jajah Mobile Web (http://mobile.jajah.com) - it is one-click access to their free or low-cost global calling service, directly from the browser on your smartphone (no application download).
Here are some of features/benefits:
* One-Click Free (or low cost) Global Calling - Jajah Mobile Web provides one-click instant access to the contacts in your Jajah address book. Just click a name or number to make the call.
* Bookmark Names and Numbers - Save your most called numbers as bookmarks. Click on the bookmarked name and JAJAH instantly dials that person.
* Avoid Roaming Charges - It gives you the ability to change your source number even to new numbers which are not yet saved within your Jajah account. This means that you can easily initiate a Jajah call to a nearby office or hotel phone when you are travelling, getting rid of roaming charges and long distance charges at the same time.
* International Calls without a special plan - In many places, and especially the US, most phones can't make an international call without a special plan from your provider. The plan alone can cost 50.00 US a year, and then the calls can cost .20-.40 a minute above that.
* It Knows You - JAJAH Mobile Web links directly into your regular JAJAH account. When you log on from your smartphone, it knows who you are, displays your contacts and and displays your account information..
I was also invited to join the JAJAH Dynamic Buttons Beta Program. They want beta testers to be involved in the design process of what Jajah thinks will be revolutionary new web based calling tools. Jajah Buttons will let you control how and when you want to be contacted - through an embedded button that you put in various places around the web - your personal or corporate website or blog, any social networking platform like MySpace, Friendsetr, hi5, any auction based website like eBay, craiglist or your email signature.
Some more info from Jajah about this "presence" feature -- Jajah Buttons enable users to make "special feature" calls from within on-site properties such as blogs, websites or emails. They can be described as portable, customizable "click to contact" buttons with user defined call and contact properties. When clicked, a small window opens which can contain information about the button owner, or information relevant to the contact preference, interaction or transaction.
It also displays contact preferences, as defined by the button owner; phone, sms, email or voice mail. The reader/viewer of this page is able to click on one of the contact options to reach the button owner.
These buttons allow the button owner full privacy, with no numbers or addresses being visible to the caller. They are dynamic and interactive. They have various settings to control button behavior. Settings include the ability to restrict each function by days or hours, set button expiry date, choose who pays, change receiving number/email, block incoming numbers/names. Similar to Iotum in some ways.
- Buttons work independently from phone numbers, location or email address. User can change his contact specific in the jajah preferences.
- Users can have multiple buttons for multiple purposes/audiences
- Buttons eliminate the need for extra email addresses. Since your email address is private and non-visible to viewers, you can use a single address for multiple types of interaction.
- User can create email signature that enables managed communication
- User is able to block specific people from contacting him.
- User can set the time he allows / accepts calls. For example, a person can specify that he be called between certain hours but at other hours, only be reached via sms or voice mail.
Want to make free phone calls from your Blackberry? Well, there is now a piece of software called 
Actually walkie-talkies have a range of 2 miles or more - good for the ski slopes. WiFi doesn't reach quite that far.
To be eligible for All Calls Free, users have to log in to their account and make a call using Gizmo Project to attain “active” status. The countries included in this plan are China, the United States, Brazil, Japan, Germany, Thailand, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, South Korea, Spain, Canada, and more. (Sadly, calls to India are not part of the plan, so calling mom is still going to cost a lot of cash. Acceptable expense, I would say!) 
“Wholesale PSTN rates are sooo cheap these days that it’s not much different than the cost of bandwidth back when I started Scour.net,” says Jason Droege, chief executive of SIPphone, the company behind Gizmo Project. “In the last 12 months I’ve seen wholesale PSTN costs drop dramatically and I expect this to continue. ” (I would need to check on that – its almost midnight, so cannot hassle folks at Telegeography just as yet!)
FierceVoIP has released a list of their Top 15 VoIP Companies of 2006, which FierceVoIP Editor Dan Rosenbaum calls the Fierce 15.
Globe Dialer
