Jajah, a popular VoIP service provider, has released a new English/Chinese translation service called JAJAH.Babel just in time for the Olympic Games. The service, which was developed in conjunction with IBM, allows users to call a free number to get a near-instant translation of spoken sentences. The service isn’t meant for voice calls abroad – instead, it’s a handheld translator. After speaking your message into the phone, you hand it to the person you’re speaking with, and the phone spits out the translated message.

Using the service is fairly simple, and should work from any phone line:

How does JAJAH.Babel work? From English to Chinese or in reverse:
Dial JAJAH.Babel from any phone. U.S. local access number: +1.718.513.2969
Choose which language you want your message translated into (either English to Chinese or Chinese to English)
Say your message and press #
You will be able to confirm that your message was properly understood by the system.
The message will automatically be played back in Chinese. If you wish, simply hand your phone to the other person or put the phone on loudspeaker so they hear the message.
The other person can then record a message in Chinese, following the steps above, and you will hear their message in English.

To help test the service I recruited TechCrunch intern Matthew Schulz, who is fluent in Chinese. His conclusion was that it worked surprisingly well. The translation from English to Chinese sounded a little bit awkward, but the meaning was obvious. As for speech detection, the service had some trouble when he spoke Chinese in his normal tone, but when he enunciated a bit more than usual the results were almost perfect.

For now, the service is limited to translations between English and Chinese Mandarin, but the companies plan to release new languages in the near future. You can get more information about the service along with more local access numbers here.

Just over a week ago the founders of and five engineers from VoIP services provider Jangl left for Jajah after the company failed to find a proper suitor. Following their departure, it was unclear what would happen to Jangl’s assets and remaining staff. Now we hear from multiple sources close to the deal that Live Universe has agreed to acquire both.

This appears to conclude the Jangl saga that started late last fall. Around that time, Jangl’s board began telling the founders to pursue an acquisition strategy in lieu of raising more money. The board’s decision came even when the company had closed deals (some profitable) with several partners, including Plentyoffish and Tagged.

We hear there was a disconnect between the VCs, who had a more enterprise background, and Jangl’s executives, who were set on developing a consumer-facing brand. The founders, and Michael Cerda in particular, are said to have worked diligently to carry out the board’s marching orders. But despite many companies showing interest in Jangl, it struggled to find the right company for its exit.

An acquisition deal (apparently with WhitePages.com) came close but unraveled after the terms changed and became far less acceptable. With no apparent options left, much of the company’s staff was notified that they would probably have to find new work, and it was finally announced that Jangl’s founders were indeed jumping ship.

Just what Live Universe plans to do with everything they left behind has yet to be seen. I’m sure Jangl’s partners will be interested in hearing the fate of their agreements, if they haven’t already.

VOIP provider JAJAH has just got a welcome boost via a deal with Yahoo that will see JAJAH power premium voice on Yahoo Messenger.

Under the deal, JAJAH will provide its proprietary telephony infrastructure, payment processing, and customer care to Yahoo Messenger users using the platform for receiving calls from the PSTN network, or for making calls to land lines and mobile phones.

The announcement coincides with JAJAH moving into new territory as an indirect to consumer provider as well as its direct to market service. Yahoo is the first major U.S. technology customer/partner of JAJAH’s Managed Services and JAJAH told TechCrunch that they expect to announce new partners including landline operators, cable companies and mobile carriers in the coming weeks.

JAJAH’s existing VOIP service recently passed the 10 million user mark.

Do you really want random people on the Web IMing you? Google thinks so. Yesterday, it added a chatback widget to Google Talk that lets you put a little badge on your Website or blog linked to your Google Talk account. When you are available, visitors to your site can start an instant message conversation with you. This is a similar idea to all the call-me buttons that have proliferated from startups like Jajah, Jaxtr, Tringme, and GrandCentral (now part of Google). But keeping it to text chat makes more sense. IMs can be ignored easier than a ringing VoIP line.

Still, you are really asking to be distracted if you turn this feature on. Or disappointed. What if you put the badge on your site and no one wants to chat?

When it comes to connecting with new friends safely and privately, Jangl fits the bill. The “Social Communications Widget” lets you make calls, send SMSs, and leave voice mails without exposing anyone’s phone number through a simple widget.

In contrast to their competitor, Jaxtr, they’ve been mainly spreading through a series of direct deals with social networking sites (Match.com, Tagged, AdultFriendFinder, and Fubar) and a Facebook/Bebo application (potentially on 80 million profiles). Jaxtr, on the other hand, has been spreading mainly through email links and personal websites (5 million users in under 5 months).

Now they’ve forged a deal to be featured on the maverick of dating sites, PlentyOfFish. PlentyOfFish is like every other dating site you’ve heard of, but free. Free has actually paid off pretty well for founder Markus Frind, who runs the site from his Vancouver apartment and takes in over $10 million a year in advertising.

Comscore ranked the site the number one dating site in December 2007, with an average of 1.3 billion page views a month (70,000 sessions and 3 million page views an hour).

Jangl’s widget will let daters call each other, send SMSs, and leave voice mails all without sharing a real number. The functionality makes it easy to take the next step in a relationship without sacrificing privacy, or just discreet phone sex. Calls will be terminated on Jajah’s servers as part of their existing relationship. Like PlentyOfFish itself, Jangl will be monetizing the service through text advertising; a first for the company. On other sites, the service is either ad-free or paid for as part of membership (match.com).

I’ve found social calling widgets (particularly Jaxtr and Jangl) to be the most attractive part of the VOIP market because they’re not competing in a race to the lowest calling rates, but adding real utility to our existing phone lines. Other voice widgets include Ccube, Tringme, and Snapvine. While monetization is still somewhat up in the air, both companies are testing out business models (paid Jaxtr minutes, or Jangl’s revenue sharing). Going forward we’ll see which models do and don’t work. I also expect both companies to continue adopting more advanced features similar to Google’s GrandCentral.

Social communications startup Jaxtr has been experiencing some pretty amazing growth. They’ve attracted over 5 million users in under 5 months (140 days). It’s a ten fold increase in users since they reported 500,000 users in July. Jaxtr attributes a lot of the growth to the utility of the product and virality of calling links placed in emails.

In August, Jaxtr reported 1 million users and $10 million in financing. In response to the growth, they’ve brought on Taneli Otala as VP of engineering, the former CTO of MySQL.

It’s hard to compare these new numbers with Jaxtr’s main competition, newly partnered Jangl and Jajah, because Jangl has only reported numbers about their potential reach. These numbers highlight deals with websites such as Match.com or Tagged (which reaches 40 million profiles). Jajah recently crossed over 2 million users.

Jaxtr offers a really comprehensive calling system. It lets people call you anonymously online through a widget or unique Jaxtr phone number that connects to your real number. Similar to Jangl, Jaxtr adds a host of advanced features such as call screening and voicemail, all without giving away your original phone number. They’ve also built out more functionality similar to GrandCentral. Users can link multiple phones to their account, and forward certain phone numbers directly to voicemail.

Jaxtr CEO Konstantin Guericke says about 85% of their users are international, with the other 15% based in North America. This makes sense because one of most direct benefits of VOIP systems like Jaxtr is the long distance cost savings to over 220 countries. VOIP calls save money on long distance calling by connecting calls over internet lines instead of more expensive standard phone lines.

Jaxtr users have 100 free minutes to use per month, however calls to other Jaxtr users don’t use these minutes. Jaxtr plans on monetizing by letting users buy more minutes and running advertising on the web pages of free accounts in the future.

VOIP provider Jajah and social VOIP startup Jangl are partnering up to create some new products out of a mutually recognized compatibility.

The deal makes a lot of sense. Jajah is a high-profile VOIP startup making great strides in bringing VOIP to regular telephony (with over 2 million registered users), but their recently launched click-to-call widget hasn’t yet given them a large web presence. Jangl’s calling widget, however, has distribution on over 40 million user profiles through deals with social networks like Tagged.

Specifically Jangl will be using Jajah’s back-end VOIP engine to serve their calls. With Jajah in over 122 countries, it will give them a much greater reach than previously. In turn, Jangl will be using Jajah’s newly launched pre-call advertising engine to monetize their service with geographically specified ads powered by Oridian (another one of Jajah’s recent partnerships). The two are also alluding to future “strategic development and emerging products” as well, but not saying much else.

If the two ever decide to merge (not that we have any indication that they will), either one would only have to change the last three letters of their name (preferably Jajah—Jangl is the better name, at least for English speakers). Some customers might not even notice the switch.

Ad supported telephony has been a bit of a hot topic in telephony. Jingle Networks plans on ads supporting for Free 411. Virgin launched an ad supported phone service last year. Blyk and ThePudding are two new startups that recently launched their own phone-based ad solutions. Now VOIP provider Jajah is also offering the ad-option to earn free telephony. Eventually, they hope to bring the model to other phone providers as well in an AdSense-like solution.

Jajah is teaming up with advertising network Oridian to let users pay for minutes by listening to targeted advertisements. It’s an opt-in system where users hear and see very targeted advertising content and receive credit in their JAJAH accounts for each message. Ads are targeted based on the phone’s location. For example, “If you own a furniture store that you want to introduce to your local community, your messages will be played to your prospective customers next door”, as founder Roman Scharf explains. The messages will play above the ring tone right before the call starts similar to the example embedded below.

Since Oridian is an international ad network that helps US sites monetize international traffic, I can’t imagine they’ll be focusing on your cross town calls, but rather the long distance international ones a VOIP provider effectively delivers for local calling rates (you still have to pay for minutes from your telco). Jajah says these ads will allow users to earn back their entire phone bill, or even make money too.

To make money back, you’ll have to listen to ads worth more than Jajah’s calling charges. Virgin’s Sugar Mama ad supported option lets users earn a minute for each minute of advertising heard. Jajah’s VOIP network has a significantly lower cost base costing at most three to four cents per minute to users on long distance calls. This makes it more feasible to support through advertising compared to standard phone time earned on Virgin, which may not make them money, but provide an effective rebate for price sensitive users willing to work for it.

Nearly every VOIP related startup has their own click-to-call widget, Jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr, and even GrandCentral. These widgets let you easily and sometimes anonymously set up a call with friends over the web. They’re very useful and come packed with features like voicemail and texting. However, each of these services connects phones to phones, which still eats away at your mobile minutes while you’re talking to that business contact or MySpace hottie.

TringMe offers a bit more flexibility. Callers can ditch their phone and call directly through their Flash widget to your mobile phone, landline, and GTalk (Yahoo and Skype coming soon). All they need is a microphone and one click. Although they’re still in private beta, you can try the demo widget to the right for an idea of the experience.

Similar to the other services, your phone number is kept private and the calls are free (now’s the time for that overseas call). You can also set the widget to just receive voicemails, which are emailed to you, saved on your standard mailbox, or recorded and played back in GTalk. There is one major drawback, though. Since there is no virtual phone number involved, callers have to be at a computer and can’t call you while they’re on the go.

Naturally such an easy and anonymous calling service is susceptible to abuse, and I don’t see any countermeasures in place to keep out prank calls and telemarketers. The other services have verified phone numbers and white/black lists to keep abuse to a minimum. I expect TringMe will have to incorporate similar controls to make people more comfortable with using the widget.

Jajah will be officially announcing their click-to-call buttons on Monday. The buttons, which let people call the owner for free and anonymously, have been quietly in private beta over the past year. They are also taking on international calling card services and Jaxtr and Jangl, who already have click-to-call offerings on social networks and dating sites.

The call buttons are available to registered Jajah users and come as a bit of embed code you can put on your web page or at the end of an email. They come with several customizations. You can adjust the CSS styling, adjust the number it calls, and restrict which countries can try to call you.

When users click the button, the caller enters their phone number and Jajah connects the two parties over a VOIP line. The callee is then told who called and asked if they want to accept the call, say they’re busy, or blacklist the number. If they accept the call, the minutes are charged to their Jajah account, like an “800 number”. At two to three cents per minute, it can be used for some cheap long distance calling. For the cost conscious, Jaxtr and Jangl are still free, however.

While the consumer “landline replacement” VOIP battles continue to wage (the cable companies now control over 70% of that market, and Vonage is still fighting), a number of nimble software-only startups are experimenting with their own services.

All of them allow users to call normal, non-VOIP telephones at greatly reduced costs. These savings can be captured whether or not the parties to a phone conversation are using VOIP-enabled phones, since transmissions can jump from PSTN to VOIP and vice-versa at certain junctions. For example, a cellular call to your buddy across the country might start on PSTN, quickly jump to VOIP for long distance travel, and jump back to PSTN near its destination.

The key is to use VOIP to strip out some or most of the cost of the call, allowing these startups to offer very low cost calling to consumers. These aren’t free calls, though – any time a normal phone line is used for at least part of the call, particularly the termination, the teleco’s get a toll.

Making sense of all of the new VOIP startups is daunting, so we’re categorizing them by use cases. For a comparison of features, prices, and more companies, check out this chart.

I’m Cheap and I Have a Computer

By far the cheapest way to go with calling is to get a desktop client. VoIP clients on your desktop allow users to make calls from one computer to another across the VoIP network. For an added fee, you can connect to a standard phone on the PSTN phone network for calls to or from your computer. Most of you will know this as Skype-in and Skype-out.

The most well known desktop client has been Skype, with over 100 million users. The big guys – Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google – also have their own VoIP desktop clients. Since the VoIP offerings have been built into their IM clients, combined they comprise a potential market of over 340 million subscribers.

A younger startup, the Gizmo Project, launched in July of last year. They have a reported 2 million downloads of their application. The application functions like Skype, supporting IM and VoIP calls. The Gizmo Project has the unique distinction of not only offering IM and VoIP calls, but also free calls to the standard phone network if you promote their product to a friend and stay an “active user“.

Hullo and Nimbuzz are other desktop VOIP application we’ve covered.

I like WiFi and Saving Money

If the idea of holding a laptop up to your ear to talk to your friends doesn’t sound appealing, Nokia’s WiFi phones may be for you. The Nokia N800 is a great example and takes advantage of the free in network calling of the desktop applications. Fring, which gives Skype-like functionality over 3G/GPRS and WiFi, is very Nokia friendly and just moved on to Windows Mobile. However, you still need to pay for calling standard phone lines and buy a real phone number so your friends on those dated PSTN phones can call you back. They recently raised another round of $12 million and have received a lot of praise from us in the past.

I Have a Social Life WiFi Can’t Contain

If you’re not in WiFi heaven (Mountain View) or perpetually hanging out at WiFi hotspots, there are some other semi VoIP solutions that can still save you some money, at least on long distance calls. Mobile VoIP providers don’t throw out the PSTN lines, but instead save customers money by bridging the connection between two calls the caller and callee make to local numbers with cheaper VoIP lines. However, these solutions work best for long distance where bridging local calls makes sense and still cost minutes on you mobile plan. The main advantage is that it works on that hot new phone you picked up after reading a CrunchGear review.

There are quite a few players in this category, including desktop VOIP client Skype’s own player, iSkoot. iSkoot is the mobile version of Skype, which allows you to place calls to your Skype contacts by calling their Skype servers to route the calls. Shape Services recently hacked together an iPhone version of Skype, but reports are that is suffers from AT&T’s low transfer rates. Another startup, EQO was competing in that category until they stepped out on their own with a VOIP, IM, and messaging mobile application that we’ve written about earlier.

The biggest kids on the block, with $28 million and $24.5 million in financing respectively, are Jajah and Truphone. The two startups allow you to easily make calls from your mobile phones. However, Jajah uses VOIP to bridge two standard phone lines, while Truphone can make truly free calls if your phone has a fast enough data connection. Their relationship has been further complicated with T-Mobile, a Jajah investor, kicking Truphone off their network. T-Mobile made their own venture into WiFi calling with “Hot Spot at Home“, which lets you add unlimited calling from your WiFi network for $9.95 extra a month.

Who’s Winning

While Skype is apparently making money for eBay, no other startups are profitable as far as we know. But the communications industry itself is hurting. There’s a shift is afoot particularly in the mobile industry as voice revenues drop from $51 a month in 2000 to $43 a month last year, carriers are looking for a ways to set themselves apart in the $118 billion U.S. cell-phone market. Data plans are widely heralded as the future for increasing telco annual revenue per user (ARPU).

However, this doesn’t mean an easy path for VOIP. VOIP on your mobile phone is facing quite a few challenges. The most basic problem is just distributing your application on the plethora of mobile platforms. Mobile carriers aren’t helping because they’re still reluctant to hasten the demise of their voice and content services. Verizon and their variety of subscription services (VCast, maps) are perfect example of the latter.

We’ve expressed a lot of dissatisfaction over the usability of a lot of these applications too. After it’s on your phone, VOIP services can add another rats nest of differing call rates and can sometimes only save you money on long distance calls while still costing minutes. With national long distance included in a lot of U.S cell plans, it may not make sense for a lot of users. Even still, that leaves dozens of VOIP carriers (just check our chart) competing to push down calling rates.

Then there’s the bandwidth requirements. Mobile data networks are generally not fast enough to ensure a high enough quality of service. The best way to deliver VOIP, over WiFi, still isn’t everywhere, no matter how hard Google tries. 3G provides better coverage and sufficient bandwidth, but is still controlled by carriers, who can throttle the upstream bandwidth to affect VOIP’s quality. Verizon reportedly plans to offer VOIP over 3G, but hasn’t come through on the promise since 2005.

Consequently, VOIP remains fragmented across the landline, desktop, and mobile platforms.

The crux of the matter is that winners in the this category will have to play nice with the carriers. Even startups that work purely off of data plans or your desktop need the carriers to provide the mobile networking infrastructure. Jajah is in the best position to work with carriers, by offering cheaper long distance calling while still using calling minutes that are carriers bread and butter. Services that operate over data networks, like Fring and the Gizmo Project may offer consumers better deals by circumventing the carrier’s voice plans over increasingly speedier data networks, but are directly competitive with the carriers. Undercutting the profits of these incumbents will eventually cause them to butt heads as TruPhone did with T-Mobile or some carriers have by disabling VOIP on N95s. Short of these startups changing their revolutionary rhetoric, it looks like an uphill battle.

There’s a growing list of companies lining up to port their application to the iPhone’s Safari browser. Jajah is the first to bring their VOIP client to the new iPhone.

iPhone’s standard contract isn’t cheap ($60 – $100/month). If you want to make international calls, you’d have to pay an extra $3.99/month and around 23 cents a minute for a call to the UK. However, Jajah is the first of the VOIP carriers to tailor their site for iPhone users, letting them make the same call to the UK for just 3 cents a minute. Since Jajah makes long distance calls cheaper by bridging two local calls with a VOIP line, you still have to spend some of your plans minutes on the phone call. The program is available to iPhone users through freeyouriphone.

There are quite a few other companies launching applications for iPhone’s browser such as iZoho. However, since the iPhones keypad only pops up for web forms, you can’s use your keyboard to edit documents on iZoho.

Earlier this month we announced VOIP startup Jajah had accepted $20 million in series C investment from Intel Capital. Tonight, Jajah has announced that they’ve added a co-lead to the round: Deutsche Telekom (T-mobile).

The initial news of the investment was rushed out by Intel with Deutsche Telekom holding off announcement of their investment until today. Deutsche Telekom’s investment in Jajah marks the first investment of a telco in one of the VoIP startups. Jajah expects to use the money in an upcoming marketing push and to further their business development efforts.

Aside from the financial support, the announcement marks a second key relationship. Jajah’s relationship with Deutsche Telekom is expected to come with some advantages, including increased reach into Asia and Latin America and lower calling rates based on DT’s status as a first tier provider (particularly Germany). Jajah had earlier stated their deal with Intel would provide JAJAH access to their community of product dealers, OEM customers and developers, as well as access to Intel’s range of VOIP patents.

CEO Trevor Healy says Jajah was an attractive investment for DT because their VoIP service doesn’t require customers to abandon the existing PSTN phone networks that telcos run. Although Jajah announced 2 million users in March, but Healy expects the company to reach 5 million by years end. Currently 40% of Jajah calls originate within the US, with 60% originating internationally.

VOIP provider JAJAH closes Series C funding of $20 million today, with the lead investment coming from Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of Intel.

Previous TechCrunch coverage here.

As part of the deal Intel will provide JAJAH access to their community of product dealers, OEM customers and developers, as well as access to Intel’s range of VOIP patents.

I spoke to JAJAH CEO Trevor Healy prior to today’s announcement. Although he was unable to shed any light in the particular ways JAJAH would be utilizing Intel’s patents for me, it was evident that it’s a step forward they are pleased with.

Healy did explain some of the other benefits of the new deal, aside from the additional $20 million in the bank. Having access to Intel insiders gives JAJAH the ability to better optimize their product for Intel Chips, both current and those planned for future release.

The deal supports JAJAH’s emphasis on mobile technology. From existing platforms through to ultra mobile devices that merge computers, mobile and wifi technology, JAJAH wants to be a first choice VOIP provider, and the Intel deal should help them achieve that goal.

On Skype the company tries to avoid the apples and apples comparison. As we’ve previously reported, JAJAH’s VOIP service is point to point, bypassing the soft phone of other VOIP providers by connecting calls between the caller and receiver on their respective land lines or cell phones. JAJAH calls itself the 2.0 version of Skype, Voice 2.0.

The call I took with Healy was using JAJAH and call quality between Australia and the United States was significantly better than Skype out. It is a good product, Mike Arrington called it a “killer VOIP product” and I’ll probably end up using it myself if they promise not to call it Voice 2.0 again.

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).

Tonight, Talkster launched a beta of a new presence-based communication platform in the VoIP market, with a focus on the enterprise and aim to connect callers by alias regardless of their device.

Talkster is similar to services like Jajah, Rebtel, Hullo, ConnectMeAnywhere, and Fring in that it uses VOIP to make cheap (currently free) long distance phone calls. But those services are highly targeted towards the consumer market, whereas Talkster is not. CEO James Wanless calls the consumer VoIP market a “race to the bottom of rates.” Talkster doesn’t want to play that game. Talkster has its sight set on the enterprise.

Talkster enables calls between and across phones and PCs, with the necessary software bridge. Unlike Jajah and Hullo, however, Talkster doesn’t require a download and works via the Web through your mobile phone and desktop browsers. This makes it more widely available than Jajah’s Symbian based client. Talkster will have a Java client in 2007. Currently, the system connects mobile phones, VoIM (voice over IM), VOIP phones, and PSTN Phones, with the potential to connect to any service that speaks SIP. You can also use Talkster to place free mobile calls to virtually any phone or buddies on MSN, Google Talk, and Gizmo.

After registering for the service online, you have the tedious but necessary task of inputing your contacts’ alias, email address (for VoIM), and phone numbers. VoIM contacts must accept your invitation to be included in Talkster.

When you log your mobile phone into m.talkster.com, you are greeted with a list of contacts’ VoIM online/offline status and can either connect to the contact over VoIM or be automatically forwarded to their phone number of choice. In the case of a long distance call, Talkster acts as a VOIP bridge between the two callers. When making local calls, Talkster steps out of the way and just connects directly.

If you don’t want to place a call on the PC you are working on, Talkster has call-in or call-back options that lets you place a call through the computer, but connect using the phone. The option has definite cost benefits, depending on your mobile plan.

Talkster’s device agnostic model is reminiscent of text based JumpChat and Swarmteams, but incorporating phone calls makes the model much more powerful. The Web interface was a sacrifice but it will at least get Talkster in front of the maximum number of people. An easy-to-use client will really make the service hum and make it far more attractive to test than Jajah or Rebtel. Still, we have yet to see if this is the killer VOIP service we have been waiting for.

Talkster is relying heavily on its enterprise target as the big differentiating factor. We couldn’t get the company to flush out the reasons why it is better suited for the enterprise than the consumer but we were promised that there would be added enterprise functions in 2007. Meanwhile, the beta will battle test the core service.

Alec Saunders was an early beta tester of Talkster – read about his experience here.

VOIP company Jajah just announced an exceptional new consumer service that will let many cell phone users access Jajah’s very low calling rates through their cell phone (and without using data services).

Ok, it’s true. When I wrote about the woeful state of the VOIP market last week I knew full well that Jajah was preparing to launch a killer new product this evening (and Shel Israel called me on it).

I think that post was good background material to better understand the problems with current VOIP options and the importance of what Jajah just launched. Before today it was difficult for users of normal phones to access VOIP services directly and get cheaper rates on phone calls. They almost always had to be in front of a computer to initiate a call, or go through complicated call, then hang up and call back procedures.

Jajah’s New Mobile Phone Service

Jajah’s new mobile service suffers from none of the “detail issues” that I bring up in the post last week. I walk through how the new service works below, but the end result is that you can set your phone to use Jajah for certain types of calls (such as international calls) instead of your normal carrier. From the caller and receiver’s perspective the call transaction is seemless. A call is made normally, and received normally. The only work is getting it set up.

To use the new service you must be a registered Jajah user. You must have a supported cell phone (see this page to determine if you have a supported cell phone) – Jajah currently supports phones with the symbian operating system…other phones, including Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Treo, will come later this year. Jajah sends a MMS message to your phone. Once you confirm the message a Java application is downloaded to the phone and can be configured by the user. Once configured, the Jajah software handles certain types of calls made from the phone, bypassing the carrier entirely. When you place a call, Jajah routes the call to its own local number, moves the call over VOIP to the destination and calls the recipient via a local number where they are located.

Jajah founder Roman Scharf says that the carriers can’t block what they are doing because they do not use the data services included with many newer phones. Instead, they simply re-route the call through the normal telephone lines. The tricky part, of course is getting the software installed properly on a phone to begin with (something I can’t test right now because I’m in Taiwan and because my phone, the hated Motorola Q, uses the even-more-hated Windows Mobile OS).