Happy Birthday Jajah: 2 Million Users
Nick Gonzalez
26 comments »
A year after VOIP phone service Jajah launched their service, they’ve announced over 2 million registered users (Up from 1.2 announced in January) and officially announced Trevor Healy as the new CEO.
See our consumer VOIP comparison post for an overview of Jajah and some of its competitors.
Jajah is a VOIP service that gives you lower long distance rates by bridging standard phone lines with a cheaper VOIP alternative. You can place Jajah calls by clicking on your contacts through their website (desktop and mobile), Symbian client, various browswer plugins, or Google Gadget. You can try out a one time call by going to Jajah and typing in you and your contacts info. When you initiate a call by clicking on a contact, Jajah calls back your phone and your contact’s phones. The call is then routed through your phone network (land or mobile), to Jajah’s servers, and then back out through your contact’s phone. Similar to Jaxtr and Jangl you can keep your number private. Call rates vary, but are in the 2.8 to 3.2 cent range and remain free between Jajah users.
The founder and former CEO Roman Scharf has stressed the company’s obsession with quality several times. They have over 250 telecom engines in over 45 countries worldwide and chose the best data carriers for their call paths in real time. They’ve done this on a relatively tighter budget ($8 million) than the competition to boot.
Recently their strategy has been focused around large business deals. Currently Dell, Logitech, and Symbian use their service, they were recently incorporated with Joyent, and are working on an anonymous call deal with a large dating site (Jangl has a deal with Match.com).
Congrats… it’s a great service. I use it all the time. By the way, in case anyone’s wondering about that new “Big Media” video project we’ve been hearing so much about lately: http://www.bigmediavideo.com/index.html. Cheers, chrisco
These services are very good and offer the confidentiality features that are becoming more important in this day and age.
rates ”vary” not very
- This company is well on its way - Im suprised it hasn’t been acquired for the customer base… but then again everything is not for sale
-RB
They are a lot better than Rebtel. Call around the world can be free, who will be the 1st to provide it?
I actually haven’t used this yet, I’m getting around 2c per minute to Thailand so it’s tough to justify jumping through any hoops to maybe save a little. It’s shocking how cheap it is, I remember when the lowest I could get was 50c and that was only after threatening to change carriers.
Great times we live in.
Well, first of all congratulations to Jajah, they have definitely been doing well. But this number sounds awfully high to me. For a bit of scale, you’re saying that they have twice as many registered users as Digg??
Have they given any explanation of these figures, I’d be willing to bet money that these aren’t direct jajah clients signing up via their website, but that they’ve somehow included figures for people who are eligable or pre-registered for the service via some of these partnerships, or some other twist on the numbers. 2 million registered users is just huge.
I may well be wrong though - in which case, double congratulations are in order!!
l am using yahoo voice and l think its better! thanks for articl
Jajah has gotten a lot of heat lately because of intermittent service and expensive call rates. They raised prices on a number of countries while “claiming” that rates just got cheaper.
I was also not able to use it for over a month and the solution their Tech Support gave me was to change my internet provider.
They’re giving ’s 9cents to India and cite 34cents as the typical rate. Unfortunately for Jajah, most quality calls to India can be done for 7-8cents/min. And the price is coming down by each coming month. 34cents sounds like something from 2001.
-Zaid
Wow, congrats! Will check them out.
kudos to the austrian fellows
Jajah?
“Meesa got 2 million users!”
Mark, right on.
Here is Charles Darwin’s evolution and natural selection applied to VoIP (abbreviated version):
Pre-historic period: Fixed line Telcos (Mama Bell and the siblings) - one provider choice in a house (democracy in action) - long distance costs you a fortune - customer service -> S…ks;
Not-so-ancient times: Mobile carriers – can choose between bad and very bad - can not get a signal - still pay a fortune for a long distance even without signal – customer service -> still S…ks;
Pre-Modern history: VoIP - Vonage – interesting….- fairy tale for IB kids “How to cut the tree that feeds you with an IPO jigsaw.”
Modern times - Skype - appealing and quite convenient…-say good buy to those crazy long distance bills - quality? –> Work In Progress but it does work in progress…
September 26, 2006 - TechCrunch: ” VOIP company Jajah just announced an EXCEPTIONAL new consumer service…” – Hmm… intriguing – WOW looks quite good – why not to register… - looks like I have a question, let me check the forum… - Oh MY GOD, so many p-offed customers in such a short time?? May be it’s just a bunch whiners, I’d better put a question to the customer service… 1 hour later – auto-reply a-la “Someone will get back to you shortly…” About 1 week or so later an ANSWER!… a-la “Go and read the information on our website…” Hmm… I am probably an idiot and did not phrase the question properly the first time (after thoroughly searching the site). Let me rephrase the question… 5 months later – still waiting for an answer…
(Danny R, does it sound familiar?)
March 27, 2007 – “Jajah announced 2 million registered users …” – “Oh, yeah, I remember registering with them… Sorry, someone is calling me on Gizmo and I have a customer on hold on the Skype line…”
Sometime in 2077 – “Grandpa, tell me about your days as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley…” - “ Oh my darling, it was for quite a short period long time ago…” - “What happened grandpa?” - “ My dear, just keep these three words to yourself – Jajah, valuation, due diligence…”
I interviewed Roman Scharf of Jajah in Sept of last year. I was so impressed that I signed up for an account and have been using them since to call Europe and Asia. For anyone who needs to call internationally and wants to use their own cell phone or land line, I definitely suggest they give Jajah a try.
http://www.npost.com/interview.jsp?intID=INT00163
Darwinist : It does sound familiar!
The other annoying thing is that they have spam on their forums (private messaging and posts). I can’t on getting messages to subscribe to some porn site.
I agree with the fact that Jajah is a good service, especially since you can use it on fly (thanks to the mobile web site).
But lately i start to notice a problem with the quality.
Im in bangkok and I do a lot of calls to europe. And the quality is not as good as it used to be 2/3 months before.
So jajah, congratulations, but dont forget to focus on quality in all parts of the world
“chose the best data carriers for their call paths in real time”
Eh? I’ve used them quite a bit between December and now (our office here in the UK is always trying to lower our phone bills), and their quality is HORRIBLE! It’s worse than Skype, and I detest Skype.
I do everything I can to avoid their service.
I was a big fan of Jajah at first, but lately my enthusiasm has tapered off.
- Sound quality on calls is intermittent to poor; currently most calls that I begin on Jajah (fewer and fewer), I must switch over to regular land line because of quality concerns - this is at the other party’s request, which simply doesn’t work for business calls.
- And it’s difficult to clear the phone line when you end a Jajah call. Sometimes I have to keep retrying my line for up to 5 minutes before I can get a dial tone - and that’s after closing both Jajah and my browser.
Scale is nice, and the service was good once. Let’s hope they can get it back there.
I have been testing Jajah for the last three days and have found the call quality varies from good to abysmal.
IF the abysmal quality call was one out a hundred, maybe I would continue using it. However the quality of most calls is either very poor, or abysmal.
A pity because the concept is good.
Sounds good for Jajah. I look to see even more subscribers when the iPhone is released, although I don’t know how it’ll work considering iPhone isn’t a true IP phone and Cingular will count the minutes… but that’s besides the point. I guess the main reason for Jajah is to skip roaming charges? Funny how I started with one idea and ended up with questions. Congrats to jajah anyway. We need another VoIP service provider now that Vonage seems to be sinking fast.
http://highspeed-internet-provider.com