Ian Scales: Jajah gives voice to online consultancy

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Alon Cohen (alon)

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“Jajah gives voice to online consultancy”:http://web20.telecomtv.com/pages/?newsid=42894&id=e9381817-0593-417a-8639-c4c53e2a2a10&view=news

28/03/2008 08:05:00 – by Ian Scales

We’ve all spent the last decade or so hearing about the ‘innovative’ voice applications enabled by new technology. We’ve spent less time actually having the lightbulb moments you’d hope would be associated with discovering one.

Here’s one that sort of flicks that switch. Jajah and “BitWine”:http://www.BitWine.com/search (yes, we thought they sounded like a couple of characters out of Lord of the Rings too) have got together to blend an interesting business model around online advice services. It enters the ‘interesting’ category because Jajah’s service plays a key role – enabling a remote party to initiate a conventional call.

Just to flesh out those characters (you can actually see them now, can’t you?), Jajah is a low-cost calling operator which uses VoIP in the core but initiates conventional calls to make the connections (unlike Skype).

At the heart of its offerings (there are now several) is ‘Web enablement’. Each Jajah user has a web page on which are kept all his or her calling numbers. Upon clicking a chosen number Jajah dials the user’s phone first and then the called number. Such is the low cost of wholesale call termination in most liberalised markets today, that most calls (no matter where terminated) are usually well below 4p per minute (except to mobiles). Other services, such as conference calls or delayed calls are sold as value-adds.

It costs about the same as Skype-Out but unlike Skype there is no software to be downloaded.

This is important when it comes to making contact from Web sites – browsers just won’t download software because they know it probably won’t work first time.

Being web-based Jajah can also be integrated neatly with other web-based services. Which is where “BitWine”:http://www.BitWine.com/search comes in (who I see as being much smaller than Jajah and not as green). Bitwine is about providing online experts or consultants. The idea is that if you want to get to grips with something – finances, health, your computer, relationships (yuk) – you go onto Bitwine and select a consultant. The conversation starts off as a Web chat session and then, if both sides are feeling commercially comfortable with progress, the interaction can be promoted to full-scale telephony once credit card details are taken.

“BitWine”:http://www.BitWine.com/search says the approach has all sorts of benefits over actually, you know, moving about a bit and going to see a consultant in person. The consultation can take place at a time most convenient to the caller and by being on the Web the customer feels less locked in to a particular consultant once the process starts, so it’s easier to break off and use another consultant if you don’t like what you’re hearing (it says).

Ian Scales

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