California-based Jajah, a company that deals with voice over internet protocol (VoIP), today introduced a cheap long-distance calling facility for calls from and to India. Although currently priced at Rs 3 (per minute), calls to the US and Europe will soon be made free of cost for users, claims the company.

Jajah is a simple way to make cheap calls using the Internet - without headphones, microphones or software downloads. It connects users phone-to-phone, landline or mobile, local or anywhere else in the world. An internet connection is only necessary to initiate the call. For the service to work, you needed to register at the website and then type in the number you wanted to call from as well as the number you wanted to reach.

For instance, Ramesh may be in San Francisco and wants to call his mother in India. He simply enters just his mobile number and his mother’s home number (could be a landline or a mobile number) at Jajah.com and clicks the “Call” button. The phone rings in India and a voice explains that Jajah is connecting the call. Then Ramesh’s phone rings in San Fransisco. He picks up, and the two can speak for as low as Rs 3 per minute.

“By October, we will launch our secondary business model that will allow US, UK users to make free long-distance calls and by 2007-end India will get our free telephony service too,” Roman Scharf told Business Standard. He, however, declined to share more on the “yet to be introduced revenue model” that will offer free telephony to users.

The company is also planing to add Jajah as a communication tool at the social engineering sites like Facebook, SecondLife and MySpace soon. Jajah should not to be mistaken for yet another Skype service “because Jajah allows people to make calls from their landlines or mobile phones for free or at very low rates,” Scharf said.

Jajah is funded by Sequoia Capital, the same venture capitalists that invested in YouTube and Apple. Jajah has already cut deals with many telcos for access to cheap local “last-mile” connections, and it is only the long-distance part of the call that goes over the web.

Source: Business-Standard

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