Following up my last post, yesterday I tried a VoIP service that definitely beats the other services around. You just write your number, the number you want to talk to and voila! your telephone rings and after you answer you get connected to the number you wanted to talk to. Even the name is nice www.jajah.com they give you a 5min test to surprise you and depending on the country you are, you can have free calls!
After using it to call my loved country Colombia and enjoying the good quality from my personal cell phone I started to think about their business model and how they actually manage to make money. Compared to the skype out service it has the double of costs since it actually has to make 2 phone calls and it doesn’t make use of a P2P network to distribute the infrastructure (servers) but anyway they give better prices (some cents left).
Obviously the free demo that they offer will figure in their income statement as marketing expenses, they are paying to gain a huge userbase. For now, this service is definitely better as simplicity and costs, but in the long run (let’s say 1 or 2 years) when a good percentage of the 200 Million skypers start to have skype embedded in their mobile devices… nothing beats free! on the other hand the status , Instant Messaging, videoconference and all the features that skype has as an independent software piece would not be possible to offer in this new approach.
I’m really convinced that nowadays the price of the calls are not a desicion maker when the time to choose your VoIP provider arrives, one or 2 cents more doesn’t beat the comfort and additional services that are offered. So, the technology and the people are not yet using mobile devices with Skype on them to call free, then the jajah approach is very clever as a transition but sooner or later they’ll have to switch to a skype-like service to actually make money. We’ll see…