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I predicted many times that a new trend with VoIP services would have been the ability to solve specific problems for the final users. This can lead to both services that are free for users or that users are willing to pay for. In any case, there are many ways to monetize them, directly or indirectly and the value for customers could be very high.

Jajah knows this very well and yesterday announced two brand new services, Jajah Babel and Jajah Concierge.

The former is an English to Mandarin translator (more languages will be available soon), just in time for the Olympic games. You just need to dial a number and speak out the word you want to translate. Straightforward. This service is available in U.S., China, UK and Australia.

The latter, offered in partnership with Mobivox, is a personal assistant. You simply dial a local number and ask your personal concierge to do something for you, like initiating phone calls, sending a text message or establishing conference calls, all with voice commands and hands free.

Good job guys!

Technorati Tags: jajah, jajah babel, jajah concierge, luca filigheddu, mobivox, Voice 2.0, VoIP

I just wrote about Jajah Managed Services a couple of weeks ago and now I’m here again to report that Michael Robertson’s Gizmo5 chose Jajah Managed Services for PSTN termination, billing and Customer care.

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The main benefit Gizmo5 obtains from this deal is that they can now focus on marketing and on their set of fully-featured softphones for Windows, Linux, Mac and mobile platforms.

On the other hand, Jajah is now joining forces with players that were perceived as competitors in the near past, but thanks to Jajah’s new approach they are now important partners and can get great value from each other.

Congrats to the Jajah team and to Michael Robertson and his team for this important deal! Voice 2.0 is more and more about collaboration rather than competition, big players continue to join forces to improve their offerings and services with huge advantages for customers.

Technorati Tags: gizmo5, jajah, luca filigheddu, michael robertson, Voice 2.0, VoIP

When you invested a lot of money in building a strong infrastructure, advanced VoIP services and all of this is being used by millions users everyday, why not sharing it with other service providers and new VoIP operators who want to offer innovative customized services to their users?

That’s the natural step that both Jajah and Rebtel are undertaking. Jajah, in particular, thanks to their strong partnership with Deutsche Telecom, is making it a real business division and their latest deals include Yahoo, MailVision, Pageonce, Gumiyo and many others.

Besides Jajah, Rebtel is signing important agreements as well and the first one seems to be a big one, easyMobile, the mobile virtual operator by easy Group, the UK group headed by the greek entrepreneur Stelios Haji Ioannau and much popular in Europe because of the low cost airline easyJet. The official announcement has not been made yet, but Om Malik seems to know the story very well.

The white label approach has a downside, however, that is the need of a dedicated team to take care of your partners, since your business is strictly related to the their performances. In a nutshell, you have to work closely with the marketing division of your partners to help them to grow their business, that means a bigger specialized marketing team.

What’s next? I praise both Jajah and Rebtel for the great job they are doing, definitely two companies to watch for the 2nd half of 2008. At the same time, I look forward to seeing new services that can add value to their offering, limited, right now, to telephony. However, with the recent agreement with Dial2Do, it seems Jajah is working on them and, moreover, filling the gap they had with voice-activated value added services like those already offered by companies like Mobivox.

Technorati Tags: easymobile, jajah, luca filigheddu, rebtel, VoIP, white label

Michael Cerda, CEO at Jangl, officialy announces on his blog that he and other six people of the Jangl team have been acquired by Jajah. 

Michel explains what is happening at Jangl on his blog and why he decided to bring the team together by joining Jajah. Jangl and Jajah have been part of the first agreement in the so called Voice 2.0 space and I’m happy to see that now I can just go to 2513 Charleston Road in Mountain View to meet two of my Silicon Valley’s friends all at once ;-) 

Congratulations to Michael and his team as well as to Jajah that did a great deal by getting such experienced and visionary team to joining them.

Technorati Tags: jajah, jangl, luca filigheddu, michael cerda

Andy Abramson wrote an interesting piece today about the just announced Jajah-Yahoo deal. He wrote some points I was thinking about while writing my post on the deal this morning.

Yahoo bought Dialpad a couple of years ago and let Jeff Bonforte, man behind Yahoo Messenger and former SIPPhone developer, leave the company very easily, part of the laid off which took place a couple of months ago.

I call it bad management. When you are not able to leverage your past investments in infrastructure, services and people, I call it bad management. I agree with Andy, big deal for Jajah but bad management on Yahoo’s side.

Technorati Tags: andy abramson, jajah, luca filigheddu, yahoo

Frederik Hermann, global marketing director at Jajah, sent me an email today informing that Yahoo! just selected Jajah to offer voice services to their over 97 millions Yahoo! messenger users. Pc to Phone and Phone to PC services (”PhoneIn” and “Phone Out”) will leverage Jajah’s network infrastructure as well as customer care and payment processes.

It looks like a major deal for Jajah who is clearly expanding their business model by offering all-inclusive “wholesale” packages thanks to their main deal with Deutsche Telecom which occurred last year. 

I noticed that Jajah’s website got a major update as well, which makes it more institutional rather than consumer oriented only. Good job.

Technorati Tags: jajah, luca filigheddu, messenger, yahoo

According to the usually well-informed guys at TecCrunch, Fring is launching a native iPhone version of their popular mobile IM/VoIP application in the next 24 hours.

I love Fring and it’s definitely the move I was waiting for. It seems it will be provided through the installer application on jailbroken iPhones and will offer native VoIP capability through the Wifi connectivity (cool, but it will be also its limit, the same limit I always highlighted about the Truphone solution).

Fring is doing something that others claimed in the past. Truphone developed the first working VoIP application for iPhone, even if still a demo version, while Jajah announced they are working on it. Fring never claimed something neither showed a demo version, but it seems they are releasing it for the general public. 

I’m curious to see what the next move by the other players will be.  

Technorati Tags: Apple, fring, iphone, jajah, luca filigheddu, truphone, VoIP