The Flat Planet and a Phone !

Jajah announced a few hours ago that they have received a gigantic $20m investment from Intel. Twenty million!

Now lets dwell on that. $20m is a lot for a company with a fancy callback application. Though not the first callback callaround company to raise that kind of money (Rebtel and Truphone were there first), it still makes you wonder…. Unless there is something more.

Jajah has already made some significant partnerships with device manufacturers and this seems to be the next step - embedding telephony functions at the chip level. That is definitely a different story which differentiates Jajah and demands bigger money.

Another important point in the announcement is that Jajah is gaining access to the Intel patent portfolio, which wonders of wonders, includes a patent on a PC software based VoIP phone which they applied for in 2000 and was awarded recently. As a side note, if you wonder how Intel got such a patent, when many softphones already existed at the time of application, so do I! For the umpteenth time didn’t Vocaltec launch a softphone in 1995?

So what path will Intel take with their patents? I can see a few possibilities, from bad to worse. They could use their patent power to force Jajah services on other manufacturers or they could go after other softphone makers in a Verizon fashion. Hopefully Intel will not be vindicative.

The good news is, that Jajah seems to really understand how to bring value to the Voice 2.0 world and that is good for all of us in the voice arena.

Congrats to all the great people at Jajah!