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Fri, 08 Aug 2008 JAJAH introduces multiple IP telephony services

JAJAH prepares telephony product salvo

Mary A. C. Fallon, Demo

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When Irish Olympic team members climb into any Beijing taxi during the international games, their Mandarin-speaking drivers will know exactly what they are saying even though the athletes don't speak a word of the Chinese language.

Just in time for the Olympics, Internet telephony company JAJAH and IBM late Wednesday night introduced a free,real-time, machine-translation service for any mobile telephone. The initial service is for Mandarin and English, however the two companies plan to translate other languages later this year.

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Honouring his Irish heritage, JAJAH'S CEO Trevor Healey made sure the small Irish Olympic team was the first to have the service. Eventually,the company expects to charge for translation services and share revenue with IBM, he said.
JAJAH.Babel is one of eight product developments Healey and Daniel Mattes, a JAJAH co-founder, showed off during a media briefing to underscore the 80-person company's strategy to offer consumers bleeding-edge products as proof to telephone carriers worldwide the types of new services mobile phone users will adopt.

"We offer customers alpha and beta products to help us determine how to monetize services," Healey said. "The consumer business is how JAJAH proves out technologies before channel partners (telephony carriers) partner with us. In the beginning we have to show people the way."

So far it's taking major carriers 18 months to two years to buy JAJAH's services, meanwhile the IP telephony start-up, backed by $26 million in venture funding, has accumulated two million consumer customers in 200 countries. Many customers of its "dial local, call international" service live or travel to places where big carriers aren't dominant but want to be, Healey said.

While JAJAH's service undercuts carriers long-distance calling services, the start-up's twin-track approach of offering IP telephony infrastructure services and experimental consumer services is winning them carrier business. Traditional telecommunications businesses are under pressure to offer new services and cut infrastructure costs as wholesale margins tighten and fixed-line (landline) usage drops because more people worldwide use mobile telephones.

"We take a rising tide raises all boats approach to services, "Healey said. That strategy is earning the company "substantial revenues," he said.

"We are not far from profitability," Healey said. "Carriers don't see us as cannibalizing their business. They see us not as competition,but as 'coopetition'."
Besides the new JAJAH.Babel translation service, the company announced MOBIVOX will be using JAJAH' call termination and other back-end service management features, and that JAJAH is packaging MOBIVOX's voice-enabled IP telephony platform as a new, free service called JAJAH.Concierge. For mobile phone users obeying "hands-free"phone laws while driving, it's a way to use voice commands to dial calls, send text messages, or set up conference calls.

JAJAH also announced its calling service now works on Apple iPhones and service for Blackberry personal digital assistants is available as an "alpha" plug-in, that two months is expected to be declared ready for primetime, said Shaherose Charania, JAJAH's director of product strategy. JAJAH also showed a Symbian (Nokia's open source) IP service that moves voice over wireless data networks - popular in continents like Africa where many places don't have landline services.

JAJAH also is working on ways to integrate IP telephony with IPtelevision set-top boxes, so while watching television people could see a caller's name displayed on the TV screen and decide whether to stop a show to answer. The television service would also let them use the television's remote control to direct incoming calls to other mobile phones. Imagine a teen calling home after school with a car problem and TV-watching Mom directing the call to Dad's mobile phone because he's heading home from work. A similar call-screening service will be part of JAJAH's future voice mail service, Healey said.

JAJAH showed its new open source synchronization service that lets mobile phone users pull in JAJAH's service, which converts international telephone numbers in a mobile phone's address book to local JAJAH numbers that when dialed reduce consumers' calling costs.

The synchronization is expected to convert more consumers to JAJAH's service because otherwise people won't take the time to manually convert the numbers, said Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol's CEO. Funambol is the largest, wireless open source project with about three million downloads, he said.

Next week, JAJAH expects to roll out computer applications - all part of its drive to capitalize on emerging market opportunities. Besides his 18-month-old daughter, whose first teeth are coming in,what disrupts Healey's sleep at night is the thought: "are we going fast enough?"

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