Let's see. Jajah claimed to have all kinds of advanced technology and wanted to be the next Skype in many ways. But over the last two or three months all I've seen is a partnership with Jangl (which I happen to think was more in favor of Jangl than Jajah) and now today they announced a deal with CallWave, a company that has pretty much been willing to join up with anyone who will have them.
There service was working for a while with GizmoProject, but my experience with it made Gizmo more clunky and actually created a more confused offering with numbers and voice mail. Back at the introduction some of CallWave's functionality allowed Gizmo to do some things that SipPhone/Gizmo Product founder Michael Robertson needed to show some difference from SKype. Over time those features from CallWave seemed to take a back seat and appear to have been stuffed in the trunk by GizmoProjects current technology team.
In reading the press release I don't see much that anyone couldn't already easily do with client TalkPlus and GrandCentral, or some combination of Voxalot, Junction Networks and Truphone, or from global roaming price killer MaxRoam.
So while Jajah has raised all this money from DT, Intel and teh VC's, between the Jangl deal and this one, it looks like very little has gone into developing their own IP, and most of the cash has gone to subsidize trial accounts, free minutes and a lot of biz dev work on a global basis.
From where I sit if Jajah had bought CallWave, cancelled the Gizmo deal, and offered their own soft client, plus mobile offering, then this would be interesting. But by simply renting some services from a company that will license to just about anyone, I have to wonder why so much money went into Jajah, when so little of what they are doing offers any differentiation.
I agree that we should be seeing more innovation from a company with that much cash. Maybe there's something big in the works.
Beneath it all, Jajah is really just a discount long-distance company. Instead of selling cards at the corner store, or having a catchy 800 number, they have a web-site as their front end. That said, they have found a way to get massive scale very rapidly, and that's nothing to sneeze at. Amazon is "just" an online store, and got massive scale by selling books at a loss for a long time.
Jajah's plan (I'm guessing) is to continue subsidizing calls while looking for features (like voicemail via Callwave) that will keep the site sticky so that users stay even if the prices aren't the lowest around. Maybe it's a snazzy mobile client, maybe its conference calling, maybe it's Facebook integration. Amazon ultimately got stickiness via features like user reviews and a recommendation engine and now they no longer have to be the lowest price supplier.
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Posted by: Shai Berger | January 07, 2008 at 03:02 PM