Jajah just became the latest to offer free telephony. Their shtick? Calls on the PSTN are free, between Jajah members, in a whack of countries. If you’re calling between non-members, they cost not much, but a little more than some of the services which don’t have any free calling — about 3 cents / minute here in North America.
Yawn, right?
The interesting parts are the pieces you find when you dig deeper.Â
- First, they have a business account. It’s just a regular Jajah account, but with a single bill. What it means, though, is that your employees can install any of the Jajah Plaxo, Outlook, Mac, or Firefox toolbars, and immediately start calling from within applications.
- Second, they provide a bunch of click to call buttons. Your customers can click to reach you from a web page, and your ordinary phone will ring.
- Third, they expose an API which you can use to integrate Jajah with any website or application.Â
- Fourth, scheduled calling. You can schedule phone meetings easily from within Jajah too!
By focusing on generating a volume of users with free calling between Jajah subscribers, Jajah is going to quickly create a large “community” of users. It will give them a user base to sell to quickly. More importantly, though, is that this community is actually a directory of numbers. To Jajah’s credit, they have a decent privacy policy which would prevent them from marketing this information to a third party.Â
Far from being lame, this is a clever strategy. Moreover, the technology foundation for Jajah is Asterisk, which gives them the ability to quickly build out new services, as we have seen them do since their launch a few months ago.
Free voice, new applications, and a user controlled directory… can you say Voice 2.0?
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