Two New Internet Phone Offerings Join the Market on Monday
27th Mar 2006, 18:23 GMT
Lycos, the internet portal owned by Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica SA, has launched Lycos Phone, a Windows based program that provides free phone calls when the user signs up for promotional offers for credit cards or the Netflix DVD service and is partially funded by banner ads displayed within the application. Dont want to sign up for credit cards and other promotional offers? No problem. After users exhaust their initial pool of 100 free minutes they can continue to use the service to make domestic calls for 1 cent a minute. Not only does Lycos Phone provide free or cheap VOIP outbound calling, but they also provide free U.S. phone numbers for incoming calls, which many internet based PC VOIP services dont do. The Lycos Phone service also provides PC to PC video calling, text messaging, and movie previews. The other offering is from Jajah, an Austrian based company funded by U.S. venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. Jajah co-founder Roman Scharf released a fee based PC to phone service last year, but soon found that users were primarily attracted to the service because of the low cost. Knowing that eventually someone is going to provide a similar service at a lower cost, Scharf knew that they had to take a look at their service and offer something different that would attract and retain users. What they came up with was a revolutionary service that allows users to use their own phone to make calls using Jajah as an intermediary. Jajah users visit the companys web site and enter their own phone number along with the number that they wish to call. Jajah then rings the callers number and after the user picks up it dials the other number, connecting the two lines. Domestic U.S. calls cost about 1.7 cents per minute while an international call such as U.S. to France costs about 1.9 cents per minute. The Jajah service is currently in beta with 59 percent of its visitors signing up for service and an expected subscriber base of 1 million plus by the end of the year. View: Lycos Phone View: Jajah News source: SFGate / AP News Read full story...
Two New Internet Phone Offerings Join the Market on Monday related news:
- Lycos Phone, JaJah — Broadbandreports.com
- Cybersurf Corp.: CYBERSURF Launches Free High Speed Internet Service and Digital Local Phone Services in Toronto — Market Wire - Computers and Software
- Lycos Phone, JaJah - Two new flavors of Internet telephony — broadbandreports.com
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- Lycos to enter 'Net phone fray — InfoWorld: Top News
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