Deutsche Telekom has become the latest investor in Jajah - joining, among others, Intel and Sequoia Capital - as I reported today.
The [Austrian founders], who have since moved to America to develop their product, welcomed the latest addition to their third round of funding. [Daniel] Mattes said he aimed to follow Skype, the start-up bought by eBay in 2005 for $2.6bn (£1.4bn). "Our goal was to have 1 million users after a year, because that was what Skype had," he said. "In fact, we had 2 million users in a year. We're very excited."
The premise of Jajah is pretty simple: log on to the website, enter your phone number and the one you want to call and it makes the connection over the internet. The point? Well, if you are both JaJah users on landline phones then it's free. If you are on mobile phones, then it can turn an international call into two local calls - therefore drastically reducing the cost, particularly if you get lots of minutes free in your calling plan.
But, as I point out in the article, Jajah is far from being alone. Aside from Skype's mobile VoIP offerings, there are a host of other companies trying to work out how to profit from internet calling and the huge mobile phone market - and many of them are developing complex systems which merge instant messaging and presence-based information with traditional internet telephony.
The rub, of course, comes in ease of use: everybody's still trying to find the killer way to make mobile internet calling as easy as normal dialling. So would you use one of these services? What would convince you to?
