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Content Tagged Jangl
Live Universe Picking Up Jangl’s Pieces
Just over a week ago the founders of and five engineers from VoIP services provider Jangl left for Jajah after the company failed to find a proper suitor. Following their departure, it was unclear what would happen to Jangl’s assets and remaining staff. Now we hear from multiple sources close to the deal that Live Universe has agreed to acquire both.
This appears to conclude the Jangl saga that started late last fall. Around that time, Jangl’s board began telling the founders to pursue an acquisition strategy in lieu of raising more money. The board’s decision came even when the company had closed deals (some profitable) with several partners, including Plentyoffish and Tagged.
We hear there was a disconnect between the VCs, who had a more enterprise background, and Jangl’s executives, who were set on developing a consumer-facing brand. The founders, and Michael Cerda in particular, are said to have worked diligently to carry out the board’s marching orders. But despite many companies showing interest in Jangl, it struggled to find the right company for its exit.
An acquisition deal (apparently with WhitePages.com) came close but unraveled after the terms changed and became far less acceptable. With no apparent options left, much of the company’s staff was notified that they would probably have to find new work, and it was finally announced that Jangl’s founders were indeed jumping ship.
Just what Live Universe plans to do with everything they left behind has yet to be seen. I’m sure Jangl’s partners will be interested in hearing the fate of their agreements, if they haven’t already.
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That Jangl You Hear is Sales
The web-to-mobile calling efforts are starting to get interesting. Last week Jaxtr talked about how it planned to make money by selling ads, and today Jangl launches its own ad efforts tied to a partnership with Pudding Media. The plan is to target pre-roll ads on Jangl’s existing voice calls and SMS messages by using location and demographic information provided in the profiles on various social media sites.
Jangl has already made money by selling the ability to receive calls without giving out a phone number on dating web sites, but the ad efforts are targeting bigger money. Jangl’s CEO Michael Cerda estimates the CPMs are around $30 to $60 for SMS messages ads, and around $10 for voice. Now that revenue is entering the equation, we should soon have less subjective ways to judge who is successful in this crowded market. Sales are a better metric than user numbers when it comes to figuring out which services will succeed.
Jangl Turns On Audio Ads
Jangl is finally turning on a revenue stream across its network of social calling widgets, which reach a potential 80 million social networking profiles (the company hasn’t announced actual active users). People generally use Jangl to place calls or SMSs to other web surfers without exchanging your real number. The new advertising initiative is called Mobile Media Platform and provides a set of APIs for publishers and ad units for advertisers. The strategy is similar to steps other widget providers have taken to finally make some money off their network by tying in advertisements.
Through the APIs, developers can integrate bits of Jangl’s SMS and VOIP calling functionality into their applications. In exchange, Jangl expands its advertising reach a bit further. The monetization side is being handled in partnership with Pudding Media, and Ogilvy’s Digital Innovation Group. Jangl will have several different types of ad units for advertisers, such as SMS ads tacked on to messages users send and pre-roll audio ads that play during the time you’d normally spend listening to the phone ring. Advertisers can target the ads by keyword, category, location, and demographics. Jangl’s been running tests of the SMS and pre-roll format on Facebook and Bebo with Pudding Media earlier this quarter and feels confident enough that they won’t turn users off to the service.
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If You Want To Talk Technology With A German, Try Jaxtr Cafe
Social calling widget Jaxtr has just released a new destination called Jaxtr Cafe. Their widget, like Jangl’s, provides users with an anonymous number to call each other with the added bonus of cheaper long distance calling.
Up until now, Jaxtr users found each other more or less randomly on social networks of email signatures that listed links to the service. Jaxtr Cafe, however, is a social network of sorts where some 10 million users (50-60% active) of the service can find each other and carry on conversations about whatever they want. It also gives Jaxtr the opportunity to start monetizing their free service through advertising on the site. Jangl, on the other hand, has monetized on a case by case basis (rev share on Match.com, ads on PlentyOfFish).
Every user of Jaxtr is grandfathered in to Jaxtr Cafe’s profile database. You can search amongst these profiles based on interests and geography. For instance, if you want to talk to someone who’s an Australian and interested in food, you can easily do a search through the directory for just the right person. You can then call or text them using Jaxtr’s widget.
I was surprised no to see an offering closer to Ingenio’s Ether, but that may be an additional feature in the coming months. Rather the service seems a lot like Skype Live. However there’s the added advantage that while people aren’t always on Skype, but pretty much always have their phones. It does come at the cost of your local calling minutes, but you’ll wind up with a cheaper long distance chat.
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Jaxtr’s Challenge: Turn Try It Into Buy It
VoIP startup Jaxtr said today that it has attracted 5 million registered members, up from 500,000 users 140 day ago, making the company “the fastest-growing Internet communications service in history — ahead of Skype, Hotmail and ICQ,” according to its press release.
But where is the money?
You might think that scaling to meet the needs of these millions of users represents Jaxtr’s biggest challenge. Indeed, Jaxtr expresses concern in its announcement over its ability to meet user demand. To that end, it recently hired Taneli Otala, former CTO of MySQL, as VP of engineering.
But Jaxtr has bigger problems than scaling and tuning their systems for millions of users. To make Jaxtr a real business, they need to convert sign-ups into satisfied users, and from there, transform those users into customers who pay.
Even then, there are no guarantees Jaxtr will succeed. If the promise is cheap calling, it’s just the same old VoIP thing.
How Jaxtr works
Jaxtr offers free international calls via a web-based widget. To use it, you sign up for an account then publish your Jaxtr widget on your blog, web site, or social networking profile page. You can also email callers a link to your Jaxtr page, which shows the widget. Callers click on the widget, enter their phone numbers, then Jaxtr rings the caller phone and your phone to connect you with one another.
If the caller is located in one of 50 supported countries, they will be given a local phone number they can use to call you next time — without paying long-distance charges. Otherwise, they will be provided with a U.S. number.
Each Jaxtr user gets 100 “jax” a month. Jax represent a Jaxtr-specific currency that is exchanged for minutes at different rates in different countries. Currently, once you run out of jax you have to wait until the next month to get more. In the future, you’ll be able to buy jax — and that, along with web and mobile advertising, is where Jaxtr plans to get its revenue.
The big challenge for Jaxtr: Turning try it into buy it
It’s no surprise that Jaxtr is seeing so many sign-ups: the promise of free international calls, mobile-to-mobile, is compelling. And compared to Skype, Jaxtr doesn’t require any special client software. A caller simply uses the widget once, then subsequently dials the number the widget gave them for future calls. But turning registered members into ongoing users — and paying customers — won’t be quite as easy.
First, the Jaxtr service is somewhat complicated, as a quick glance at the frequently-asked questions list proves. Plus, though it does provide for mobile-to-mobile calls, the first time a caller uses it, he or she must use that web widget.
Second and more importantly, there are doubts as to whether the Jaxtr money-making math adds up. The company must be spending some serious cash on those local numbers it gives out, as well as on connecting phone calls. Will they be able to come up with a pricing scheme for jax that makes the business economically feasible?
Five million users is impressive, but how hard can it be to find 5 million people that want mobile-to-mobile international calls for free?
Jaxtr Racks Up Over 5 Million Users In Under 5 Months
Social communications startup Jaxtr has been experiencing some pretty amazing growth. They’ve attracted over 5 million users in under 5 months (140 days). It’s a ten fold increase in users since they reported 500,000 users in July. Jaxtr attributes a lot of the growth to the utility of the product and virality of calling links placed in emails.
In August, Jaxtr reported 1 million users and $10 million in financing. In response to the growth, they’ve brought on Taneli Otala as VP of engineering, the former CTO of MySQL.
It’s hard to compare these new numbers with Jaxtr’s main competition, newly partnered Jangl and Jajah, because Jangl has only reported numbers about their potential reach. These numbers highlight deals with websites such as Match.com or Tagged (which reaches 40 million profiles). Jajah recently crossed over 2 million users.
Jaxtr offers a really comprehensive calling system. It lets people call you anonymously online through a widget or unique Jaxtr phone number that connects to your real number. Similar to Jangl, Jaxtr adds a host of advanced features such as call screening and voicemail, all without giving away your original phone number. They’ve also built out more functionality similar to GrandCentral. Users can link multiple phones to their account, and forward certain phone numbers directly to voicemail.
Jaxtr CEO Konstantin Guericke says about 85% of their users are international, with the other 15% based in North America. This makes sense because one of most direct benefits of VOIP systems like Jaxtr is the long distance cost savings to over 220 countries. VOIP calls save money on long distance calling by connecting calls over internet lines instead of more expensive standard phone lines.
Jaxtr users have 100 free minutes to use per month, however calls to other Jaxtr users don’t use these minutes. Jaxtr plans on monetizing by letting users buy more minutes and running advertising on the web pages of free accounts in the future.
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Jajah In The Kitchen With Jangl, Cooking Up New Products
VOIP provider Jajah and social VOIP startup Jangl are partnering up to create some new products out of a mutually recognized compatibility.
The deal makes a lot of sense. Jajah is a high-profile VOIP startup making great strides in bringing VOIP to regular telephony (with over 2 million registered users), but their recently launched click-to-call widget hasn’t yet given them a large web presence. Jangl’s calling widget, however, has distribution on over 40 million user profiles through deals with social networks like Tagged.
Specifically Jangl will be using Jajah’s back-end VOIP engine to serve their calls. With Jajah in over 122 countries, it will give them a much greater reach than previously. In turn, Jangl will be using Jajah’s newly launched pre-call advertising engine to monetize their service with geographically specified ads powered by Oridian (another one of Jajah’s recent partnerships). The two are also alluding to future “strategic development and emerging products” as well, but not saying much else.
If the two ever decide to merge (not that we have any indication that they will), either one would only have to change the last three letters of their name (preferably Jajah—Jangl is the better name, at least for English speakers). Some customers might not even notice the switch.
cb_widget_report_widget("cb_widget_1195120559"); cb_widget_report_element("cb_widget_0_1195120559","jajah"); cb_widget_report_element("cb_widget_1_1195120559","jangl");
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Jajah, Jangl Team Up. No Not Like That
Back in 2006 a whole crop of VoIP app companies cropped up, each one trying to figure out how they can make a business out of voice, including in-fashion, if pointless forays such as embeddable widgets for social networks. One had to look really hard to find any difference. Their record so far is no different than that of baseball team, Tampa Bay Rays.Things are no different for those who are chasing Facebook elixir.
At least two of the companies are coming to their senses, and teaming up to focus on what they are good at: Jajah on its telephony platform and Jangl on social apps. As part of the deal, Jangl will start using Jajah’s telephony infrastructure, long distance and click-to-call features. Jangl, on the other hand will focus on developing social apps using voice, including some new services for its customers in the online dating business.
“We were going to build a click-to-call service, but since they already have that, and a billing infrastructure, it makes sense to partner with them,” said Michael Cerda, CEO of Jangl. He was candid and admitted that focusing “on stuff that a company is not good at can prove to be distracting and counterproductive.”
Related Posts:
Disclosure: Jangl is an advertiser on The GigaOM Show.
TringMe: Phone Free Click To Call
Nearly every VOIP related startup has their own click-to-call widget, Jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr, and even GrandCentral. These widgets let you easily and sometimes anonymously set up a call with friends over the web. They’re very useful and come packed with features like voicemail and texting. However, each of these services connects phones to phones, which still eats away at your mobile minutes while you’re talking to that business contact or MySpace hottie.
TringMe offers a bit more flexibility. Callers can ditch their phone and call directly through their Flash widget to your mobile phone, landline, and GTalk (Yahoo and Skype coming soon). All they need is a microphone and one click. Although they’re still in private beta, you can try the demo widget to the right for an idea of the experience.
Similar to the other services, your phone number is kept private and the calls are free (now’s the time for that overseas call). You can also set the widget to just receive voicemails, which are emailed to you, saved on your standard mailbox, or recorded and played back in GTalk. There is one major drawback, though. Since there is no virtual phone number involved, callers have to be at a computer and can’t call you while they’re on the go.
Naturally such an easy and anonymous calling service is susceptible to abuse, and I don’t see any countermeasures in place to keep out prank calls and telemarketers. The other services have verified phone numbers and white/black lists to keep abuse to a minimum. I expect TringMe will have to incorporate similar controls to make people more comfortable with using the widget.
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Jajah Now Does Click To Call For Anyone
Jajah will be officially announcing their click-to-call buttons on Monday. The buttons, which let people call the owner for free and anonymously, have been quietly in private beta over the past year. They are also taking on international calling card services and Jaxtr and Jangl, who already have click-to-call offerings on social networks and dating sites.
The call buttons are available to registered Jajah users and come as a bit of embed code you can put on your web page or at the end of an email. They come with several customizations. You can adjust the CSS styling, adjust the number it calls, and restrict which countries can try to call you.
When users click the button, the caller enters their phone number and Jajah connects the two parties over a VOIP line. The callee is then told who called and asked if they want to accept the call, say they’re busy, or blacklist the number. If they accept the call, the minutes are charged to their Jajah account, like an “800 number”. At two to three cents per minute, it can be used for some cheap long distance calling. For the cost conscious, Jaxtr and Jangl are still free, however.
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Jaxtr Closes $10 Million Series A; Announces 1 Million Users
Jaxtr has raised a $10 million Series A round led by August Capital with Mayfield Fund, Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Luxemburg-based Mangrove Capital participating. They’ve also doubled their registered user base over last month, totalling 1 million users. They plan on getting to a break even point on the investment and to total 20 million users by the end of next year.
Jaxtr, like GrandCentral, uses VOIP as a utility to add features to your existing phone. Many other other VOIP startups focus primarily on cost savings (We have a roundup of VOIP services here). It’s service lets you anonymously post your phone number on the web and get cheap long distance calling rates. It works by connecting calls to your existing phone service through a Jaxtr number on VOIP. Calls are anonymous because they are made to a new Jaxtr number instead of your existing number. This lets you push all calls to voicemail and choose who can and can’t call through directly. Calls are cheaper because long distance calls are made over VOIP lines instead of standard phone networks. Jangl is another player in the category, also enabling you to control access to who calls your phone.
Although you can access the service easily through an embeddable widget, Jaxtr has found a lot of its growth coming from direct call links placed in emails or on non-social networking websites. Jangl has been expanding through a series of business deals, most notably with Various, Inc, Justin.tv, Fubar, and Revision3, bringing their online profile presence to over 20 million.
As part of taking the company to a break even point, they will be releasing a paid service, incorporating advertising, and pursuing new services on social networks (TBA). The paid service is expected to be their lead revenue generator, with the first paid component simply allowing people to buy more Jax, the virtual currency that converts into local phone minutes. Currently users get 100 free Jax each month, which convert into 100 minutes in the US, with conversion rates depending on local telco costs (sometimes as low as 15 minutes in Europe). Longer term plans include tiered monthly minute plans, like cell phones.
Their second revenue stream will be through on-site advertising within user’s Jaxtr accounts. A look at their Alexa traffic shows traffic growing noticeably upward in fits and spurts, mostly due to users checking their Jaxtr voicemail. Although the company currently isn’t disclosing traffic numbers, Konstantine doesn’t dispute the Alexa numbers. He explains the dips as periods during which they had trouble keeping up with the growth.
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A Look at Supernova 2007 Connected Innovators
At Supernova’s 2007 Connected Innovators session, 12 young startups (well, 13 if you count the fake one planted to keep the audience on their toes), pitched their products to an audience at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco with punditry by Kevin Werbach and Michael Arrington and supporting color from Josh Kopelman, Julia Hanna Farris and Paul Kedrosky. Here’s a look at the 13 companies:
 adap.tv |
 AdaptiveBlue |
 Aggregate Knowledge |
 CastTV |
 Critical Metrics |
 Jangl |
 Pando Networks |
 SodaHead |
 Spock |
 Wize |
 ZapMeals |
 ZenZui |
 Zing |
Adap.tv - They’re like adsense for video, tying contextual text ads based on the content of a video. When videos play, Adap.tv digs up relevant Amazon products and Looksmart ads to populate an ad bar on the bottom of the video at key moments. They use tags and other meta data, as well as speech to text translations to find out what the video is about.
AdaptiveBlue - Makers of the Blue Organizer, a Firefox bookmarking and tagging add-on that parses web pages, adding contextual information where appropriate. For instance, if you go to a web page about a band, Blue Organizer’s right-click menu will show you more info about the band drawn from sites like Odeo or Wikipedia. The plugin also has smart links that let you easily push the link to services like Digg or LibraryThing. More coverage of the recent feature additions here.
Aggregate Knowledge - One of the more established companies at the event, they work with online commerce sites to provide personalized recommendations by looking at user’s collective behavior. They just closed a large round of financing and are rumored to be profitable after a little over a year in operation.
CastTV - A video search engine that pieces together context for a video based on it’s metadata, the content surrounding it, and the content of pages linking to the video. The service performed well in our earlier review. They recently raised a $3.1 million round of financing from DFJ.
Critical Metrics - A music recommendation service that aggregates music reviews from around the web. Each song includes an audio and optional Youtube sample and purchasing options from services like Yahoo Music, iTunes, or Rhapsody.
Jangl - They specialize in anonymous phone communication. A Jangl is a real phone number lets people call you with knowing your real number. The first time someone calls you they have to leave a message and request permission to connect to you directly. You can ban a number at any time as well. They just recently launched a service that lets you generate a Jangl number for any email address and leave a voicemail for that user and number for a callback. Calls are served over a VOIP bridge, so it also makes long distance calls cheaper.
Pando Networks - Desktop peer to peer file sharing service Pando speeds up file transfers by torrenting files and buffering them over their higher speed network of servers. At Supernova they’ve announced their Pando Publishing Platform that lets users easily publish to the web with the cost savings of peer to peer. The platform gives publishers the benefits of P2P video streaming amongst their users and CDN peering service. P2P streaming lets users view video incrementally instead of after a lengthy download. Their CDN peering service will let turn a regular CDN server into a supernode that will save on bandwidth by balancing load between users and the main servers. They’ve already lined up content partners NextNewNetworks, Blip.tv, and Rever.
SodaHead - A polling destination site that lets users poll their friends, SodaHead experts, or strangers. Polls are embeddable widgets that can be voted on at the destination site or any page featuring the code. Polls also feature comments so users can express opinions that don’t fit into any of the options.
Spock - A people search engine that automatically aggregates information linked to a person along with support for updating contacts.
Wize - Wize is a site that tracks expert and user product reviews across the Internet and churns them through an algorithm to create a single, 1-100 “WizeRank.” Earlier this year they got a $4 million round. We have a review of other review services here.
ZapMeals - Adding a little levity to the event, Zapmeals is a startup spoof (e.g. the fake) that aims to be a marketplace for meals, hooking up hungry stomachs with nearby home cooked meals or caterers. You choose your cook based on a member rating system and their fleet of couriers would deliver the meals to your home.
ZenZui - A new way of surfing the web on your mobile phone browser, Zenzui economizes on your phone’s screen space by displaying sites and services as icons on a grid display. You can scan the 36 slot grid using your numbered keypad and zoom in for more detail on a specific service. We covered their launch here.
Zing - Zing enables mobile music players to connect to music libraries over WiFi. They’re currently powering the SanDisk devices for Yahoo Music and Pandora.
You can see a Wink powered group for the event here.
The 12 real start-ups were hand-chosen from more than 130 applications. StumbleUpon, one of the 2006 Connected Innovators, has already enjoyed great success as a newly acquired eBay business. We have high hopes for more great success stories from this year’s crop of Connected Innovators.
Disclosure: While these companies were selected from 130+ applications, they were required to pay a fee to participate once selected. As a partner to the conference, TechCrunch received a percentage of that fee.
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Jangl Uses VOIP to Create Anonymous Phone Numbers
Jangl formally announced the opening of their beta service this morning. Jangl provides an ID that users can give out to other people to create a VOIP number unique to a single relationship between two people. VOIP is used as the connection between any two phones, be they land lines, cell phones or VOIP calls. The service has been in use at Match.com for several weeks but it’s now available to anyone through the Jangl site.
When you sign up for a Jangl account, you provide your phone number, a PIN and a Jangl ID. You can then give people the Jangl phone number and your Jangl ID. The first time they try to make a connection, the caller has to record a greeting requesting permission to connect. A Jangl ID holder can remove that permission later and no longer be reached through the number. The service is free at launch but Jangl says they expect to charge a fee in early 2007.
Jangl has raised a total of $9 million in two rounds of funding over two years, the second round closed in July. Funders include Storm Ventures, Labrador Ventures and Cardinal.
It’s a little awkward to ask someone to call this company and put in your ID, maybe you’ll accept their call and maybe you won’t. Once a connection has been made, then the individual connection gets a regular ten digit phone number that can be called. I’m sure this will work for situations like online dating, but I can’t imagine off the top of my head how I’d use it in a professional context. I give out my direct line fairly frequently and even the occasional cold call by PR people doesn’t bother me enough that I would want to initiate those relationships with a phone number everyone knows I could cut off at any time. Give me time though and perhaps my cynicism will grow.
I can see a lot of possible applications of Jangl but regular individual use isn’t one of them.
One way or the other, this is another interesting and innovative use of VOIP. While Skype celebrated its first instance of 8 million simultaneous users last week, its huge price tag is widely seen as a loss to the eBay community that has failed to use Skype in conjunction with auctions. Instead, services like Jangl, JaJah, Grand Central and now the newly released TalkPlus are all leveraging VOIP to connect the mobile and land line phones we’re already using. Will this be the real market viable application of VOIP technology? It could be, or it could be proof that the best use of this technology is still yet to come.
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