I presented Jangl for 12 minutes at the Red Herring event yesterday and then hung around for the awards dinner. We were presented a nice award from Alex Vieux and Joel Dreyfuss. It was nice to get this for sure, and was nice to spend the day there in Monterey. It was also nice to sit in and see real time how Jaxtr and Jaduka (aka companies that shouldn't have bothered starting their names with a J) present themselves. I also caught up with GrandCentral and TalkPlus.
The use cases Jaxtr presented were a) you want to rent your vacation house out, but don't want to give your real number b) you want to date c) you want to call someone in another country or d) you want your friends to hear a special voice greeting. They also said that 70% of their users come from international users (primarily in Israel and India). Wow. Don't tell me all those people are using Jaxtr on their MySpace pages! This is pure long distance arbitrage and nothing else. That's not a knock against them by any means, but it is a knock against the likelihood they can monetize those users in any other way. They cite SMS ads as their initial revenue stream; although I don't think they do real SMS just yet - and certainly not to Israel and India. It's still early days though and I respect their efficiency. As an aside, I got to spend some time with their CEO Konstantin back in August '06, just before he left LinkedIn for Jaxtr. The meeting was me pitching him on doing a partnership with LinkedIn. He didn't mention he was leaving, nor that he was already advising Jaxtr, so I was a little peeved when I learned of his role there, and even more so when he became the Jaxtr CEO in December '06. ...I knew I was educating him, but I thought it was in the spirit of doing something with LinkedIn. Oh well, that's the nature of the beast and a little bit flattering that I could help psyche him up for this emerging industry.
Jaduka has really been around a long time, as Privatel and MyPrivateLine. They license their platform services to social networking sites, auctions and personals. There were a lot of logos, but no claimed integrations with any of them. When asked who their partners were they claimed Oddcast, which has 8000 customers. They also offer services for consumers (although they don't focus there), for enterprise and for app developers {all this and the kitchen sink}. I felt as though Jaduka was an experimental branch off of their parent company Network IP. I think to some extent Jaduka is a result of an identity crisis. It's an easy trap to fall into when you have some technology and you're trying to find a customer for it. The woman without the mouth frightens me actually. I do like their president guy though, he's just a normal guy getting along. I did give him hell for the name;)
Craig from GrandCentral was there on a panel talking about the next killer app for mobile. It's always a pleasure to hang with Craig - he is a good guy from my neighborhood. They of course have their GrandCentral for mobile working, which isn't an app, it's a WAP service. It offers a visual voice mail, which is quite cool actually. I just signed up for their service this week and plan to play with it some more. I think the challenge for them will be convincing people to start giving out their GC phone number instead of their mobile. It's hard psychologically to adopt a new number. Great stuff though - I am rooting for them. It helps that I don't really consider them competitive, but I'd like them even if they were. I actually heard Craig on CNN from my XM radio the other day.
Finally, I saw Jeff Black from TalkPlus. As you probably know they have a mobile app and if you have a phone it works on, you can download it and pay various fees for various minute allocations, along with conference calling, 2nd # for dating and such, and identity management. Since this is a mobile download, I also don't exactly consider TalkPlus a competitor. They did make a run at our initial partners in online personals, but no dice. I think it's a tough sell to expect an online personals site to ask their users to download a client on their mobile. They also have some services targeting the adult scene dubbed Shadow Number.
Anyhow, I got more than I bargained for during my day in Monterey. Back to work on the new release...which will better clarify to those that wonder, what the differences are between Jangl and Jaxtr.
Technorati Tags: jangl, jaduka, jaxtr, red herring, talkplus, grandcentral
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