jajah

O2, the mobile arm of Telefonica Europe, appears to be the winner of a bidding war for voice over IP start-up Jajah, according to a report on TheMarker that Reuters is citing.

O2 is expected to buy Jajah this week for $200 million, according to a report on the Hebrew language news site. Cisco Systems and Microsoft were rumored to have been competing for the VoIP start-up.

Jajah representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Jajah, which provides low-cost international calling to more than 25 million users, already has the ability to terminate calls or transfer calls from … Read more

Twitter users on Thursday will, for the first time, be able to make voice calls directly to each other through the microblogging service.

A new third-party offering from Jajah known as Jajah@call is expected to go into beta Thursday morning that will allow Twitter users to initiate a two-way voice chat with other users by typing "@call @username"--where "username" is someone's Twitter ID--into any Twitter client. During the beta period, the company said, the calls will be limited to two minutes, but the company will evaluate that length during beta. However, it sees … Read more

Online dating services eHarmony and Match.com on Thursday plan to begin using a special version of JaJah that lets users make anonymized voice calls to people they're interested in.

Unlike streaming video, which is a hot trend in online dating sites, users are limited to standard telephone communication like voice calls, SMS, and voice mail. Both sites are using a version of JaJah that's focused specifically on privacy permissions. Users can't just call someone without the person on the other authorizing it first. The same goes for both voice and text messages. Also, neither party gets … Read more

Internet phone company Jajah can turn the iPod Touch into an iPhone. (Download from CNET Download.com.)

The company, which competes with other low-cost Internet calling applications such as Skype, announced Thursday a new application that will allow Touch users to call and text messages using a voice over IP network instead of a carrier's cellular network.

All that is needed to start making calls is the Jajah application, the latest version of the iPod Touch, a microphone headset, and a Wi-Fi connection. While the Jajah service can reduce calling costs up to 98 percent, the fact that it … Read more

Intel's remote wake-up chip could finally turn PCs into phones.

One of the biggest drawbacks of current PC-based Internet phone services like Skype, which allow people to make phone calls from their computers over the Internet for free or for reduced fees, is that you can't receive calls when the computer is turned off. But that is changing with a new chipset introduced by Intel Thursday that allows computers to wake from "sleep" to accept calls and do other tasks like accept downloaded content.

Intel has teamed up with JaJah, a California-based voice over IP start-up, … Read more

If you're already bored of getting English translated to Mandarin through JaJah, TwitterFone, another mobile service with voice recognition savvy, has put out a neat update that's sure to burn through your mobile phone minutes. You can now listen to the last 10 tweets from your Twitter pals and respond to any of them that you'd like using the same speech-to-text system in place for publishing tweets of your own.

It's certainly not as fast or easy to parse voice messages as the mobile version of Twitter (m.twitter.com), but if you're on an … Read more

Telephony service JaJah has launched two completely different voice tools that are both useful in their own right. The first is a new "concierge" service that lets you call any of your contacts with voice dialing using a special local access number. It works even if your handset does not support voice dialing, and will connect you to that person as long as you've synced up your address book with JaJah's.

The other service, called Babel, is more useful for people visiting Beijing as part of this summer's Olympics. By calling a special phone number … Read more

Yahoo announced on Tuesday that it's no longer going to power Yahoo Messenger's Internet telephony service with in-house technology: the company has inked a deal with start-up Jajah to replace its phone-to-PC and PC-to-phone communications.

Under the agreement, Jajah will start providing the service for Yahoo's "Phone In" and "Phone Out" features, which allow members to make calls to landline and mobile phones, starting in the third quarter of 2008. Yahoo's telephony option is a paid service; Jajah will be responsible for processing the payments, and providing customer support and the network … Read more

The "dial-around" phone service, Jajah, just launched a new service that lets you access it without going near a PC.

Dial-around services usually work by asking you what number you want to call. Then the service will make two calls, one to that number and one to your phone. The services then connect the two phones via their own VOIP networks. Calling rates on dial-around services are low since traditional telephone networks are only used to make two local phone calls.

Jajah's latest trick is that it can assign a local Jajah Direct number (local to you) … Read more