One thing you have to admit, even though many new media start-ups are not as innovative as they should be, their names are very creative. Here is another player in the VOIP market. JaJah just secured funding from Sequoia, a Silicon Valley based VC who also used to invest into Google. Some of you may speculate, where the name comes from. Maybe it originates from some gunja smoking Austrians with dreads, listening to Roots Reggae on a transistor radio and shouting a “Jah, Rastafari!� to each other across the room. Some of their site graphics would suggest that. Well, now the weed smoking Austrians can do that via the Internet and over much longer distances for very little money.
There is nothing new about Voice over IP. I first tested telephony via the internet in 1998 and nowadays we have big telecom players like AT&T and the alike offering good VoIP rates for businesses and homes for years and guess what, you don’t even need a computer anymore. You just grab your phone and dial, like before. Another hyped start-up, Skype, seems to be a small player in this market controlled by the big global telecom giants, although it was just bought by eBay for app. $ 4 Billion and gets more and more users worldwide. So? What is different about JaJah? After all the company was only online for 2 weeks, before Sequoia invested.
JaJah has another (very unique! smile) approach. It only uses the Internet to market its services. You go to their site, fill in your own number and you’ll be called by their server, which allows you to make a call instantly. This concept is not new. Call-back cards and numbers have been around in the mid-90s and were quite popular. So again, what is new and unique about JaJah? As much as I look, I can’t seem to find it. I am sure after the media buzz about JaJah in the last days, their phones are running hot and especially local investors from Austria are killing each other over the opportunity to invest more. Well done. That could be a concept as well. You are a big known VC, invest some little money in a local start-up and create a media buzz about it. Others will invest and take over your risk. You may even be bought out fast, because some other investor or telecom company thinks it’s nice to have that company. Well, that is Sequoias business, not mine. The only thing making me really afraid is to see how some lazy journalists (e.g. at Spiegel.de) are just re-writing, without switching their brains on and spending some time on a little research, what they get served by a PR agency. But OK, lets hype again. It was fun the last time at the end of the 90’s until the bubble exploded and the crying was loud.
One thing is for sure, although JaJah may have been happy to secure the funding, they may have not been happy about the traffic that hit their sites yesterday. After the news were posted on various news sites together with their link, their site was down for quite a while and I assume their servers and their network were not prepared for a high amount of traffic load. Well, with a smile on my face I have to say, that is what you get if you rely on Microsoft. JaJah is using Microsoft on their backend and that suggests that their newly received cash will be burned fast by the technology department. Anyways, some may say I am a jealous writer, but let me tell you, that I have never had an Internet-Startup. We always said and still say, when being approached with the question if we want to be a partner in a start-up: “We are the guys who sell the shuffles, not the gold diggers.� And that since 1995, without even once getting infected with the “innovative start-up virus�. One may argue of course, that this is stupid as well. Why not take the money and enjoy life (or burn it), as so many others do it.
Links
JaJah
http://www.jajah.at/
Article on Spiegel
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/technologie/0,1518,402574,00.html
Sequoia Capital
http://www.sequoiacap.com/