Jajah, My Latest Article, Alec's Squawk Box, Web Talkification

How's that for a title? And now I'm going to skillfully - I hope - tie all these things together.

Jajah is the common element to all the items in the title of this post, and let me explain why. Today Jajah got a lot of attention from Alec Saunders, myself, and by extension our audiences. Here we go...

1. My latest column for Service Provider Views on TMCnet ran today. It focused on - guess who - Jajah. If you've been following my columns there, you'll know why - and you haven't, well, now is as good a time as any to read 'em. Here's the link to the article, which includes an interview with Jajah's CEO, Trevor Healy.

2. Trevor was the subject of today's Squawk Box podcast, hosted as usual by Alec Saunders. It runs about 45 minutes, and covers a lot of ground, but is focused mainly on today's release of some interesting research done by Jajah about what's on the minds of carriers. I touched on this as well in my article, and the research certainly validates a lot of the FUD that's preoccupying carriers these days. You can also read more about the report highlights in this morning's press release, which they were nice enough to cite me in.

3. Yesterday, Alec Saunders had a terrific post built around Jajah as a lead-up to today's podcast. More importantly, though, Alec expanded on Jajah to a broader discussion about the "talkification of the Web". The main idea echos something I've been saying for a while - Web-based voice apps like Skype and GoogleTalk aren't really competitors to telcos. In a simple sense they are, but more importantly, they're making the voice pie bigger.

As Alec illustrates, as the price of voice falls, usage increases, and guess what - some conversations are more valuable than others. Very true. There are calls that have to be carrier-grade, and we're willing to pay for those --- and there are calls where we're happy to trade off a bit of quality for less cost or free.

In short, I'm with Alec - Web-based calling isn't going away any time soon, and neither is the PSTN. This is the new world of Telco 2.0 and carriers cannot turn the clock back. Jajah has read the tea leaves very well, and is in a great position be a telco's best friend - or nightmare.

So, there's good reason why Jajah is getting all this attention now, and hopefully I've tied all the pieces together here. Let me know if I'm missing anything, and while you're at it, please share your thoughts.

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Jajah, Jon Arnold, Service Provider Views, Alec Saunders