Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Squawk Box April 29 – Guest Roman Scharf

by alec on April 29, 2008

Today we talked with Jajah co-Founder Roman Scharf about their big announcements this morning.

We started by discussing the 10 million users that JAJAH announced. It turned out that these were pure JAJAH users, and that buttons and other widgets comprise only a small portion of those 10 million. According to Roman, growth in JAJAH Web and JAJAH Direct has been 600% over the last year. Moreover, none of the users from their Jangl agreement, or other partner agreements were included.

We also discussed the Yahoo agreement and the managed services platform. Dan York took the lead asking questions here, and did a great job.

Roman talked about the advantages of JAJAH owning its own network. Among the many were lower costs, better quality control, and reduced fraud. In my conversation with Daniel last week, one of the points he highlighted was that JAJAH had taken steps to deal with fraud. He highlighted it as industry leading fraud prevention. Roman reinforced this discussing how fraud prevention has become one of the key selling points for the platform.

Finally, one of the frequent comparisons is between JAJAH and Skype, a point which Roman was quick to shoot down. JAJAH is not Skype, he said. JAJAH users are primarily ordinary phone users — not headset users.

Enjoy the podcast. See you tomorrow on the SquawkBox.

Squawk Box April 29 [ 44:06 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

{ 1 comment }

Interview with JAJAH's Daniel Mattes on the eve of their deal with Yahoo!

by alec on April 29, 2008

Thought JAJAH was old news? Think again. Having attracted a whopping 10 million users in the last two years, up from 2 million just last year, they’re now expanding their business in dramatically new directions with the launch of JAJAH Managed Services. JAJAH co-founder Daniel Mattes explained it to me as a turnkey telephony service, with everything from network services to billing incorporated in the package. And their first customer? None other than Yahoo!, who will outsource voice services for their 97 million Yahoo IM users to JAJAH.

The completeness of the platform is apparent in the diagram below (click to enlarge). With services ranging from SMS to payments, to fraud detection, and IVR, JAJAH has provided a soup-to-nuts telecom service that can be delivered in part or as a complete solution.

When I compared JAJAH’s platform to Ribbit, asking if they were competitors, Mattes demurred. In keeping with how they are positioning JAJAH Managed Services as a suite of services that partners can pick and choose from according to their needs, he described Ribbit as a toolkit for creating front end systems, and invited the Ribbit team to use JAJAH’s network for their backend services.

JAJAH’s network now spans over 200 points of presence all knit together by a global VoIP backbone. Using a combination of industry standard codecs, a proprietary codec of their own creation, and automated quality measurement tools, Mattes claims quality indistinguishable from the PSTN. I’ve tried it myself, and the claim rings true.

Please join me on the SquawkBox at 11 AM today with JAJAH co-founder Roman Scharf to discuss todays news. It’s sure to be an interesting and engaging call.

{ 15 comments }