Jajah ambitiously offers its web-activated telephone and calling services in a variety of forms, from email clients to mobile devices. They received the opportunity to apply themselves to another market segment.

Jajah has touted a 10 million-strong userbase for its myriad products before today’s announcement. Yahoo supports a few more users than that, in the range of 97 million Yahoo Messenger users currently.

Yahoo made Phone In and Phone Out available a couple of years ago to those Messenger customers, giving them a low-cost option for calling from their PCs, mobiles, and landline phones. The deal disclosed today passes the heavy back-end lifting of customer service, payment handling, and infrastructure to Jajah for these services.

GigaOm pointed out an existing connection between Yahoo and Jajah. Om Malik wrote the two firms share a common investor: VC giant Sequoia Capital.

Jajah Buttoned Up By eBay

We heard about the Jajah Buttons connection to eBay earlier in the week, when we received an email from them disclosing the new Buttons feature. Anyone, including eBay sellers, could embed a Jajah Button to enable easy click-to-call functionality on their auctions, websites, or blogs.

Jajah managed to pull this off in roughly the amount of time it took for the electrons to cool on eBay’s announced Skype writeoff at the beginning of the week. What Skype was meant to do for eBay’s sellers, Jajah accomplished in short order.

Rather than rewarding Jajah CEO Trevor Healy and company for their accomplishment, eBay had what we might think of as a hissy fit. Valleywag has the sad story of auctions containing Jajah Buttons:

In response to this affront, eBay last night deleted all auctions with Jajah buttons on them. Reportedly, eBay and Jajah had reached some sort of tentative agreement giving Jajah users the go-ahead to put Jajah buttons on their auctions — but that deal is now clearly dead.

Even with the fierce pushback from eBay, Jajah still came out looking good. They managed to do something Skype couldn’t seem to fulfill for eBay, and received some publicity in the process. Maybe after Meg Whitman and the eBay board have a cup of tea and settle down, they will give Jajah another chance at doing what billions of dollars worth of Skype didn’t.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Watch highlighted the silent launch of Live Local’s new Call for Free feature. By clicking the link, a window opens and prompts the visitor to enter a phone number.

Once entered, clicking the call button will ring the visitor’s phone. The call then connects to the business the person wants to reach.

It works like the web-activated telephony site Jajah does. Since Jajah offers a plug-in for Outlook, one of Microsoft Office’s most widely-used applications, it would not be surprising if Microsoft is using their technology for the functionality.

In a section about privacy, Microsoft said it contracts with third parties to provide the Call for Free service. The only information those third parties will be provided with is the telephone number entered by the user to facilitate the call.

Users of the Call for Free service can opt to save their number with Local Live, and have it immediately available for future calls. Calls made with the service could still incur fees for the caller if their incoming calls, such as on many cellphone plans, are not free.

Microsoft noted in its help file for the service that currently only US numbers are supported in the Call for Free feature. Also, the service does not support calls to phone numbers with extensions. Only the first ten digits are accepted.

Call for Free gives Microsoft another selling point for local businesses for its new online self-service advertising business, called adCenter. The company can show how it can quickly connect potential customers to an offline business from a web search, and how the business could draw more online attention with ads from AdCenter, and perhaps a domain name and web site from Office Live too.

—
Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

In the new service from Plaxo, the Jajah telephony service uses an existing phone to connect calls instead of requiring a software install or a microphone and speakers on a computer.

By clicking a contact in the Plaxo address book, the Jajah service connects the caller and the recipient.

When the recipient picks up the call, the caller’s landline or mobile rings as Jajah handles the connection between the two, and bills at a per-minute rate.

Jajah members will have Plaxo powering their address books as part of the partnership. Later this year, JAJAH will build on Plaxo’s API to introduce the capabilities of the Plaxo smart address book to their members.

With the deal cited as a revenue opportunity for Plaxo, that company will probably benefit from revenue sharing with Jajah. T

erms of the revenue-generating aspect of the deal have not been disclosed. For Jajah, the arrangement will get their service in front of Plaxo’s 10 million users.

The pricing offered by Jajah and the ease of using existing phones to benefit from those rates could be helpful in increasing usage of the service.

Since Plaxo’s address book can be used on a variety of platforms, the initiative will be available to a broad variety of computer users.

Plaxo did receive some unwelcome news today, though. Reunion.com disclosed it has filed a lawsuit against Plaxo for infringing on its intellectual property. They provided some additional details on the action:

In summary, a good news, bad news day for Plaxo.

—

Add to Del.icio.us | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.