Jajah

» see jajah.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

jajah was the no-install voip pitch. skype in 2005 already had tens of millions of users, but skype required a download on both ends and an account. jajah built around the regular phone number. you put your number in one field and the other person's number in the other field. jajah's server placed a call to both ends in sequence and bridged the two pstn legs over voip in the middle. the receiver did not need an account. they just answered a normal phone call.

roman scharf and daniel mattes founded it in austria in 2005 and quickly moved the headquarters to mountain view with a dev shop in israel. the beta opened in july 2005, the 1.0 web product launched february 8, 2006, and by 2007 jajah was offering free calls between registered users in a handful of corridors and cheap pstn rates everywhere else. the integration with yahoo messenger in april 2008 pushed the registered base into eight figures.

telefónica announced the acquisition on december 23, 2009 for approximately $207 million. the consumer brand kept going for a while, but the parent quietly converted jajah into the back-end carrier for yahoo voice. when yahoo killed yahoo voice on january 30, 2013, jajah lost its largest customer. exactly one year later, on january 31, 2014, telefónica digital shut the rest of the service down.

i did not use jajah. by 2008 i was on msn messenger for chat and a turkish prepaid line for actual phone calls, and the web-rings-both-phones trick never had a turkish corridor cheap enough to matter. it surfaced for me later as one of the european voip companies the big telcos kept buying just to take off the board.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the trick ~

the two-numbers-one-form interaction was genuinely novel for a few years. it sat between skype, which required full software install on both sides, and a regular calling card, which required you to remember a pin and dial a long access number. jajah's web flow turned the browser into the dialer. by 2010 every major mobile operator had its own version of the same trick, often called "click to call" or "web-initiated voice," and the standalone product had no remaining edge.

~ how it ended ~

telefónica acquired jajah at the end of 2009 to bolt voip onto its mobile business and to seed what later became telefónica digital. the consumer site got less attention every quarter. yahoo voice was the load-bearing partnership and when yahoo killed it in january 2013 jajah was already a back-end product with no customers left. the january 31, 2014 shutdown was a formality. no farewell post and no migration, the domain just stopped resolving the service.

~ the long tail ~

roman scharf went on to angel investing in vienna and daniel mattes went on to found jumio, the identity-verification company that later had its own scandals. jajah itself left no public api and no archive. the $207 million telefónica paid in 2009 was one of the larger european web-2.0 exits at the time and it produced essentially zero lasting product.

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