Italy has today witnessed the announcement of GoJajah, a new service offered by Mountain View, CA-based Jajah in partnership with italo-american Funambol.
The service, that will be tested in Italy as a “world premiere” as they like to call it, promises to make your international calls 98% cheaper. The process is really simple.
You login or signup on GoJajah and insert your mobile phone information and carrier. You will then receive and SMS and your phone will be configured to use the service, basically it will create a duplice JAJAH contact with a local number for every international number it finds in your phone.
This means that every call you will make to any foreign country will be billed by your mobile operator as a local call (it will also count into your minutes if you have such a plan), on top of that you will need to pay the standard Jajah rates that are ridiculously cheap.
The service will benefit and appeal to many diverse and new type of clients, from the immigrant wanting to call home, to the budget focused executive.
“We are using Italy as a test market because of its mobile penetration, always ahead when it comes to mobile phones”, says Fabrizio Capobianco, italian expat in silicon valley and now Funambol CEO. His company is the most advanced provider of email and mobile data synchronization, based on open source software and web applications. The software, that has been developed in Italy, in their R&D labs near Pavia, synchronizes data over-the-air (Ota), provides the platform for the online registration in addition to security, monitoring, diagnose and reporting services.
Capobianco ironically says “this could also be a stimulus for italian mobile operators that never really considered international calls”.
“Italy is one of the leading countries in wireless technologies. We are happy to launch GoJajah here, especially in partnership with Funambol” said Trevor Healy, Jajah CEO. “Jajah’s services are very popular in Italy, which is one of our most important markets. We are happy to work with Funambol, their mobile open source platform integrates perfectly with us”.
World class chats.
You can watch Fabrizio’s announcement on YouTube (in Italian).
Jajah collaboration with funambol will give a boost to Jajah. We are expecting more cheap calls rates from these VoIPs services. Other big players like Skype, Truphone and Vopium should consider these sort of strategic alliance to capture the market.