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Travel Savvy: Staying in touch for free or ET Call home

Written by: Anne Garber

Article Overview: If you're not using Skype or an equivalent Internet-linked phone service for at least some of your communications, you're wasting money. But don't stop with Skype; the world is full of clever and free phone services riding on the coattails of the Internet to deliver your voice via ethernet to friends and family.

Travel Savvy: Staying in touch for free or ET Call home

by Anne Garber

If you're not using Skype or an equivalent Internet-linked phone service for at least some of your communications, you're wasting money. But don't stop with Skype; the world is full of clever and free phone services riding on the coattails of the Internet to deliver your voice via ethernet to friends and family.

Most of the services have funny names, like Jajah and Jaxtr, no doubt to entice the younger generation for whom vowels, punctuation and capitalization are inexplicably uncool. But regardless of your age, these online services still can save you a good deal of money, if you carefully research and compare options to find the program that best suits your needs.

A prime example of the group, Jaxtr links your phone to the Web and helps you bypass international roaming rates. Konstantin Guericke, a native of Germany and Jaxtr's chief executive, says it also lets you screen your calls, answer only the ones you want and send the rest to voice mail, lets you use any phone you want for Jaxtr calls . . . and more.

You can get a "local" number in any of 50 countries, including Japan, France and Britain, for instance, but you can sign up for the service regardless of your home country. A local number lets people in that area call you at cheaper rates.

Jaxtr is still in beta (testing) mode (it started in December), but Guericke -- now based in California -- expects his basic package to remain free for at least three years, even after premium services are added for a fee. However, you are limited to a certain number of free minutes of use per month.

Jaxtr does a number of other things, but its main purpose is to link voice to Web communities, like social networks and blogs. You can place Jaxtr's widget on your MySpace page, for example, thus allowing others to call your Jaxtr number for free.

The longer-established Jajah is similar, using the Internet to let you make free local and international phone calls, when, as with Skype, both sides of the service are members and the call is started on the Jajah website.

Jajah looked very experimental in its early days -- and one had to wonder where the money to keep it going would come from, as its business model seemed full of holes. How long, we wondered, would Jajah continue to offer 60 minutes of talk-time per day for free? Well, we got our answer earlier this year -- when Jajah was heavily invested in by Intel -- as now new "members" get only 150 a week for free (still quite a generous amount of between-member talking), and once an initial trial period is over, the accounts must be further enabled by adding a minimum of $5 in payment. I got around the risk of authorizing automatic withdrawals from my credit card on a recent visit to France; my Amex card would have arrived too late to my home in Canada for me to take it with me, so a helpful American Express customer service person (named TK) suggested having me pick up a replacement card from the American Express central office in the 6th arrondisement in Paris. The only drawback (which I saw as an advantage) was that the card itself would expire in 2-1/2 months. This effectively limited my exposure, so I added a little cash to each account we had open, and we could continue to call our folks in Canada while we were in Europe. Perfect.

In Canada, the U.S, China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand, the calls are free between Jajah members on both landline and cell phones. In a score of other countries such as France, England, Ireland, Italy and Taiwan, calls are free only on landlines. But even if you are calling a mobile in, say, France, from, say, Canada, the cost charged against the payment you just made on your Jajah account will be far less than what you would pay to call a mobile phone on, say, Shaw's digital phone service.

As mentioned above, the hitch with Jajah is that after a certain "free trial period," you will be asked to pony up some cash. The minimum is $5, and if you put it on a credit card that is time-limited, you'll be back to your free 150-minutes-per-week status. Be sure NOT to tick the radio button for auto-renewal of fees or new charges will go through automatically.

Voice-over-IP firm Jajah is experimenting with advertising-funded models that could mean free telephony in the future. Although most VoIP services offer free calls now, they're usually only to other users of that service, with calls to landlines or mobiles being charged -- albeit at a lower rate than non-VoIP telephony.

However, Jajah co-founder Daniel Mattes says that advertising could lead to totally free calls. "Currently, 80 per cent of our revenue comes from telephony, with 20 per cent coming from additional features like conference calls or video calls," he says.

"We are testing advertising-supported models, and we think that at the end of the day, it will be possible to offer really free telephony based on a sponsorship model. It's not far away."

The advertising would take the form of audio ads at the start of your call, as well as traditional online ads on the Jajah website, where users initiate their calls. "It will be a choice of the user," says Mattes. "They will choose whether to pay and have no advertising, or have a sponsor. It must be relevant though, and not be intrusive."

This is just one of the innovative aspects about Jajah. Another is its focus on ease of use: getting users to enter their telephone number on its website, and the number of the person they want to call. Jajah's system then calls them, patches in the other person, and thus provides internet calls through standard telephone lines.

"It started because our girlfriends didn't want to use Skype, even when we installed it on our home machines," says Mattes, referring to himself and co-founder Roman Scharf. "They didn't want to be tied to a computer or a headset. Beyond that, we also realised that existing services were too complicated for this mass market. So we tried to make VoIP telephony as simple as searching Google."

Mattes says Jajah now has nearly three million users in just over a year's operations, which is impressive. The big news about Jajah this week, however, isn't to do with the way it works. It's to do with its latest round of investment, which includes funding from T-Online Venture Fund, which is part of Deutsche Telekom. Mattes says it's the first time a big telecoms firm has invested in a VoIP company.

"The traditional telecoms firms see Wi-Fi players eating their revenue, and they can either accept it, fight against it, or become part of it," he adds. "Deutsche Telekom is an example of the industry giants stepping into the VoIP market, which will really move things along."

Deutsche Telekom joins an earlier strategic investment from Intel, and Mattes says the two firms are looking for more than just a return on their investments.

"Intel are going to embed Jajah inside their chipsets, in the same way they did with Wi-Fi, and made it a mainstream market," he says. "And Deutsche Telekom will follow a similar policy, offering Jajah as part of their services."

Meanwhile, Jajah is focusing on product development, including ensuring its website works on all manner of devices from mobile (it has a slimmed down mobile site) to PSPs and BlackBerrys. Richer features will be introduced too, in the same way that Jajah introduced a conference call function, where users simply enter five numbers into the website interface, letting Jajah do the rest.

"You click to call, and all the phones will ring," he says. "All the features we embed will be embedded in a way that is extremely Jajah-like."

GrandCentral is yet another relative of the free-Internet-based-phone-call idea -- and it is available only in the United States for now -- but it has even more bells and whistles than Jaxtr and Jajah, if you're into those kinds of things.

For now, you must be invited to try the service. But if you can finagle an invite during its trial period, you will be rewarded with what many geeks believe is the Holy Grail of phone service: one phone number for all your uses.

The beauty and simplicity of that idea is surely one of the reasons Google snapped up the company over the summer for future unspecified plans (feeding the rumour mill speculating on Google phone developments).

Since then, Google managers have been exploring how to export the service to Europe, where mobile phone rates and regulations are greater and more impenetrable.

With GrandCentral, you use not only one phone number to receive all the calls placed to your mobile, home and office numbers, but you can use one voice mail box for all your phones as well.

But wait, there's much more: GrandCentral can ring different phones based on who is calling you, let you hear why someone is calling before taking the call, record calls on the fly and access recordings online, send you voice mail notices by e-mail or text, customize "ring back" tones by caller, and let people call you from a Web page without showing your number.

Expect to spend some time on the web-pages of any of these services -- and a handful more like them around the world -- to figure out which is right for your phone habits. Look closely at their rates and fine print, and pore over their "frequently asked questions" section.

Even after you are satisfied with the text descriptions, it will be worth cruising the blogs to find out what ordinary users' real-world experience is with them. These are, after all, experimental.

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Article Tags: anne garber, beta testing, capitalization, coattails, free minutes, funny names, jajah, jaxtr, konstantin, no doubt, premium services, prime example, punctuation, skype, social networks, voice mail, vowels, web communities, widget, younger generation



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