Jim Liddle's Blog

Now everyone knows about VOIP, and everyone knows about Skype. Skype is pretty useful if you are doing Skype to Skype calls or even Skype to phone calls from your desk. Currently however mobile Skype just does not cut it...  It doesn’t work over GPRS, barely over 3G (if you can get a consistent decent signal) and Wi Fi hot spots are not always easy to find and still tend to be not free and quite expensive.

What is needed is something simple and easy to use. What is needed is something like Jajah.

Jajah was founded by Daniel Mattes and Roman Scharf.  It is a service based commercial model in which you register and purchase minutes, as well as registering handsets or moible phone numbers.

The basic premise of this is that you enter details (either using the web, a midlet on a phone, or using the integration with Outlook and Mac Address book) of the person you want to call and which handset of yours you want the call to come to.  Jajah then calls you and calls the number you want, and tadah !  You are connected.  Underneath the hood it is routing the call over the least expensive network infrastructure so that it can charge you the least amount of money for your call.  We estimate that using it via a mobile could reduce our bills by more than a third.  That is a fair amount of money spread over even 10 employees.

What I like about Jajah is that they don’t pretend not be a telephony company. They embrace it and work on using new technologies and providing the best value they can. They don’t insist on using VOIP for VOIP’s sake. They offer the least expensive way of attaining quality of service.

What is even more interesting is their business model. The system itself is built using Asterisk but they also have some propreitary IP for when it comes to routing calls, and for the actual voice algorithm. The first version prototype was built in two weeks. Version one was built in 92 days !

Off the back of this they have more than 1 million registered users and 82% of all visitors to their site try the service straight away - that is some success story.

Watch out Skype, Jajah is coming to get you ! That is unless Truphone gets there first...a Jajah competitor..or is that a Skype competitor...damn, now I've got myself confused !!

tags: jajah  skype  truphone  voip  asterisk
links: digg this  del.icio.us  technorati  reddit