« Previous post
Next post »

November 30, 2006

Jingle’s Free 411 Service Hits 100 Million calls

Michael Arrington

37 comments »

Jingle’s free 411 service has announced that users have now placed over 100 million 411 calls.

The company, which we profiled in October 2005, has raised over $60 million in capital to date, has taken over 3% of the U.S. 411 market.

We interviewed Jingle Networks CEO George Garrick and investor Josh Kopelman back in October at TalkCrunch. Jingle isn’t creating a new market - they are destroying an entrenched, $8 billion market with a free product.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 10:07 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Jingle Networks Announces 100 Millionth Call « Screenwerk

    November 30th, 2006 at 11:11 am

  2. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Jingleの無料411番号案内サービス1億コール達成

    November 30th, 2006 at 4:22 pm

  3. Bazaarblog » Blog Archive » Bad Profits and Enjoy the Free 411 Calls

    December 1st, 2006 at 6:13 am

  4. IP Hosted PBX » Jingle’s free 411 service crosses 100 million mark

    December 2nd, 2006 at 10:10 pm

  5. iPhoneSystems - VoIP News and info » Jingle’s free 411 service crosses 100 million mark

    December 4th, 2006 at 5:03 am

  6. Mr. Cheap Stuff

    December 5th, 2006 at 1:02 pm

  7. IP Hosted PBX

    December 9th, 2006 at 7:52 am

  8. AT&T Acquires InFreeDA, Gets Into Free 411 Business at Swiss Podcast Directory and Blog

    December 26th, 2006 at 5:40 pm

  9. 包茎悩み解消.com

    April 8th, 2007 at 11:30 pm

  10. 1-800-Free-411 Has 6% Market Share of U.S. Mobile 411 Market

    June 25th, 2008 at 10:11 pm

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Say No to Crack

    November 30th, 2006 at 10:14 am

    WOW, how do they make money? I just called this service and asked for my wife’s # … they immediately connected me to an operator with no wait (the voice recognition couldn’t understand my last name), then he connected me to her … all without paying anything or listening to any ads.

    If the voice recognition works the whole way through, do you have to listen to an ad? I just can’t believe this would stay free forever.

  2. sam

    November 30th, 2006 at 10:37 am

    Hi…

    disclosure…. i have no relationship with these guys…

    my mother has an aversion to most tech things. i told her about the service, walked her through it.. tried it myself. actually rather satisifed with it. why give someone else the $.30-.50 per call, when i can get the information for free…

    and yeah. i’d be willing to listen to an ad or two every now and then…

    keep up the good work!!

    peace

  3. xxdesmus

    November 30th, 2006 at 10:45 am

    great service, I can deal with 1 advertisement if I get the number I need!

  4. Erik Master

    November 30th, 2006 at 10:51 am

    Certainly interesting revenue model which can also be useful for Palore voice calls.

  5. TechTalk

    November 30th, 2006 at 10:57 am

    I’ve been using this for a while, and as the sys admin at work have instructed all our cell-using employees to use it instead of 411. Saving us hundreds of dollars a week easily (regular cell call 411’s are like $1.45). I’m looking into reprogramming our landline voip system to automatically convert outgoing 411 calls to 1800free411 without the user knowing …

  6. ginchy

    November 30th, 2006 at 10:57 am

    According to Jingle’s press release, their service accounts for a whopping “nearly 3 percent” of directory assistance calls (the entire market consists of something like 500 million calls per month).

    I wouldn’t exactly call a nearly 3 percent market share “destroying” competing business, except in the Bush adminstration sense of “weapon of mass destruction” which means “nonexistent thing”.

    So, like, is Jingle turning a profit yet?

  7. Sean

    November 30th, 2006 at 11:24 am

    WASSUP!!!!! This is AWESOME!!!! I LOVE FREE!!!!

    Go get ‘em Jingle!!!

  8. Aidan Henry

    November 30th, 2006 at 11:29 am

    This is the epitome of the term ‘disruptor’. This service will take over.

    If I were a traditional 411 service, I wouldn’t be sleeping well at night…

    “Jingle bells… jingle bells… profit all the way… oh what fun it is to disrupt a stagnant market all the way… HEY!”

  9. Brian McConnell

    November 30th, 2006 at 11:34 am

    Having done a lot of work with call center systems, here are some numbers to consider:

    A typical call center seat costs quite a bit on a per hour basis. I’ll be generous and assume they used cheap telecom equipment and pay a bit above minimum wage, and that they match staff perfectly with staff. No benefits or extras. No overhead for management, etc.

    Unloaded cost of employee: $8.00/hour
    Cost of 800 number per employee: $2.00/hour
    Calls per hour: 50, about one per minute

    This is a very conservative assumption since this doesn’t capture things like management salaries, support contracts, etc, and still works out to a per call cost of about $0.20 before you factor everything else in.

    To break even on advertising, you’re then talking about a $200/CPM rate. Steep. Outside of a few specific niches, pizza delivery comes to mind, it’s hard to picture advertisers paying that much.

    Free services make a lot of sense when the incremental cost of the product is zero, such as a fully automated web service, but not when a product has a direct payroll cost. You can scale web services, Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to people.

    I don’t disagree that 411 is overpriced, but if the carriers offered it for $0.50/call that’d be a rational price for a service that costs money to operate, especially if you don’t treat employees like livestock. If that’s too much, Google SMS works most of the time.

  10. RT

    November 30th, 2006 at 12:03 pm

    Their connect charges to the advertisers are all over the board. The doctors get hit the hardest $20-$40 for a connect. I’ve signed up as an advertiser - will report back.

  11. Steve

    November 30th, 2006 at 12:09 pm

    (#1) >> I’ve tried it before and had to listen to a sponsor ad. I have no idea how you bypassed the whole thing without having to hear one.

  12. Doug

    November 30th, 2006 at 12:54 pm

    I used the service and didn’t mind the ad as much as I would have thought. Unfortunately, the service didn’t ask me to confirm that it had found the correct listing for me. They should work on that. Otherwise, I think this is a very interesting service. Like Google, they may be able to build a “database of intentions” on the voice platform. That could be worth a lot…not as much as Google b/c fewer advertising opportunities per customer interaction, but still interesting.

  13. MetroBellevue

    November 30th, 2006 at 1:18 pm

    I use the service all the time and don’t really mind the pre-roll ad at all. It’s free!

  14. Alex

    November 30th, 2006 at 2:50 pm

    Unloaded cost of employee: $8.00/hour

    The call center guy in India makes about $200 per month. Assuming he works about 200 hours a month, that translates to about $1 an hour. So I would rethink those numbers that you threw out.

    By that estimate, we are talking about $0.06 per call, which translates to a CPM of $60. That might be more achievable, though still kinda steep.

  15. People Finder

    November 30th, 2006 at 4:20 pm

    I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they are destroying an old market, but it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

    Especially if phone companies get smart and start offering real time DA online for free and try to make money on ad sales. I think this is what is coming next. Why dial for 411, if you can do it faster and more efficiently online.

  16. MetroBlue=JingleEmployee

    November 30th, 2006 at 7:12 pm

    Oops. You’d have to be an insider to even know the term “pre-roll.” Try a bit harder next time.

    I know this space well. Easily 3/4 of the comments are from Jingle people or folks in their investor sphere.

    I believe in ad-supported DA, but just because there will be losers (big telcos) doesn’t mean there will be a winner other than the consumer. the days of $1-2 411 calls are ending, and we have jingle to thank for that.

    But in q1 2007, the real way to win in this mkt will be released. Chip, Josh, George, be afraid, be very very afraid.

  17. David Mackey

    November 30th, 2006 at 8:09 pm

    It’ll be interesting to see how other 411 services respond, and if Jingle will successfully penetrate the mainstream. I’ve never used 411.

  18. Drama 2.0

    November 30th, 2006 at 9:57 pm

    What’s stopping 411 from switching to this model? If it’s taken $60 million in investment to gain 3% marketshare it would take over $5 billion to gain the other 97%. Obviously, I’m being a bit facetious and this is not a serious projection, but I suspect that the 411 providers will look closely at this same model at some point if necessary.

  19. John

    December 1st, 2006 at 2:05 am

    Anyone remembers EasyInternet? They setup massive internet cafes in many European Cities (there is also one in NYC), with extremely low prices, practically killing their competition.

    Well guess what happened, other folks didn’t stand by and just adjusted their prices. EasyInternet had real trouble dealing with that. As consumers, we should thank them for that, but as a business, they weren’t too successful.

    Similarly, Jingle’s 411 will reform the market, but with little stickiness, other players will follow in the long-run… Investors beware :)

  20. jayowen

    December 1st, 2006 at 8:14 am

    Just be carefull you don’t diall 411-free instead of free-411 otherwise you get a phone sex line.

  21. basicity

    December 1st, 2006 at 8:48 am

    Jay, you’re right. I mistakenly dailed 411-free one time and ended on a sex line. I hate paying $1 or whatever it is that they charge for calling DA. I have used this free service many times and I really like not having to pay $1 each time. Investors beware but consumers rejoice!

  22. Mike

    December 1st, 2006 at 9:32 am

    I heard Michael mention this free service at the Web 2.0 conference in Northern Virginia a couple months ago and was excited about it. I’ve used it a good bit and really like the idea, but they haven’t quite caught up to standard 411 yet.

    Sometimes they have trouble finding numbers that I can still find with traditional 411 and their voice recognition system does not pick up my voice as well as traditional 411’s does. I get passed through to an operator a lot.

    The other day, a 1-800-Free-411 operator told me she ‘had no listing” for the business I was looking for and, rather than asking me for more information or looking in a nearby town, she just hung up. I called tradition 411 and got the number right away.

    1-800-Free-411 is a GREAT idea and a service I’ll continue to use (I always try them first and then use traditional 411 if FREE can’t help me), but they still have some improvements to make.

  23. NeoTechie

    January 5th, 2007 at 11:49 am

    The best things in life are free !

  24. Igor

    January 11th, 2007 at 7:35 am

    1-800-FREE-411 provided by Jingle Networks offers the same 411 service that we get through our cell phones’ 411 but it adds a fifteen second advertisement after we request a phone number but before we are given the results.
    -
    Best Regards,
    Igor V. Krasovsky
    Font River

  25. Jason

    January 18th, 2007 at 12:37 am

    Can’t wait for these types of services to start appearing down under !

  26. depressione

    March 9th, 2007 at 7:23 pm

    I believe in ad-supported DA, but just because there will be losers (big telcos) doesn’t mean there will be a winner other than the consumer. the days of $1-2 411 calls are ending, and we have jingle to thank for that.

  27. stress

    March 9th, 2007 at 7:24 pm

    very good!!

« Previous post
Next post »