Telcotrash

Mino Wireless Gets $7M From Canaan Partners

Mino Wireless, a mobile VoIP service providers which can be put into the "minute stealer" category, has pocketed $7M from Canaan Partners. Mino was founded in 2004 and passed the 100,000 user mark in September 2006 (press release). Previous investors include TNP on the Road (Japan/Silicon Valley Fund), Freeze LLC, AWE net, and "a few angel investors in Silicon Valley and Asia." (Via VentureWire, requires subscription)

Update: here's the announcement on Canaan Partner's website.

JaJah is going mobile

The Austrian-born and Mountain View, CA based VoIP start-up JaJAH today announced on their blog JaJAH Mobile: calls with JaJAH can now be initiated from a mobile phone (if you are a lucky owner of a phone that runs Symbian™ or Java (J2ME), that is).
JaJAH is funded by Sequoia Capital and Globespan Capital Partners.

Telephony's Next Act

I have passed on the dark side of the force for the last three months and been working on a software-related topic - principally getting to know the upper layers of the stack better. I shall pick up regular blogging again from next week onwards, together with my return to the more traditional world of communications.

In the meantime, you should check out an excellent article in Spectrum Online on "Telephony's Next Act", or the challenge to move from circuit-switched networks to IP. The article itself tells nothing spectactularly new, but it's an article I would take to my grandmother to explain what the difference between her old phone and VoIP is, and what it will take to get rid of her old phone number in an migration to ENUM.

Net2Phone Receives $18.8 Million from Altice One

Net2Phone has received $18.8 Million from Altice One. Altice One already has a licensing agreement with Net2Phone (NASDAQ: NTOP) and is offering VoIP to its cable customers in Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Altice One owns Coditel, which is a cable operator in these countries. In December 2004, Altice One bought out France Télécom's cable assets together with private equity group Cinven. Net2Phone itself is currently up for sale.

Vertical markets for VoIP

I've blogged before about the potential of IP communications in vertical markets when there is value-add beyond legacy voice replacement from business process integration. Healthcare is an often cited example, and while there has been much theoretical talk about it, here (link) you will find some excellent case studies of how Wi-Fi and VoIP helps an industry to completely re-define its processes and to save on infrastructure costs. The article also clearly points out the remaining challenges, such as spectrum management in areas that are highly sensible to radio interference like hospitals.

One particular passage caught my attention:

"[..] what's most important about their VoIP system is that the handsets contain intelligence that allows them to link into the hospital's data management system."

That's it: the rise of the dumb network, or to add intelligence at the edges. An this is also in my view where the big opportunity lies for the IP communications industry (yes, this is a no brainer, but I still have the impression that this has gotten too little attention). Companies that will be able to create this intelligence will be the ones experiencing the major value creation by cutting out ineffiencies from an industry's processes. In this context, I also believe that too little attention has been given to human-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications: in the search for the next killer application, many seem still to focus only on seamless voice communications in a mobile environment.

Product review: uConnect VoIP box

Andy recently reported on VoIP memory sticks. Here is another one, the Firebox uConnect VoIP box, reviewed by Pocket-lint. And how else could it be, they used Skype with the stick....

VoIP in Kenya

TelecomDirect News features a story on Telkom Kenya's new international VoIP service. The service can be accessed from any landline through a calling card, which explains why VoIP despite Kenya's rather low teledensity and Internet penetration is actually an option. It also doesn't touch Telkom's national PSTN revenues.

While Kenya is probably not a role model for developed markets, there are some general lessons to be learned valid for all telecom markets where IP communications are gaining a stance (certainly nothing new, but just to cite the evidence). Telkom's VoIP service is a response to other providers offering cheap international calls using VoIP. Previously, Telkom tried to fight competition by re-balancing their tariffs (next to the usual measures such as regulatory intervention, disconnecting competitors, etc.).  But minute-based tariffs and bundles are nothing else than a smoke screen for putting a variable price - based on usage patterns to manage your margins - on what is actually a fixed-cost business. Tariffs do not reflect the actual cost of service but are used to artificially inflate rates and to skim the market - the argument though goes that prices are set in a distance-sensitive way, because the call has to pass a longer way on the network (similar to roaming charges in mobile networks).

With IP distance does not matter anymore, and as bandwidth becomes more widely available and cheaper, incumbents cannot maintain their distance-sensitive business model. Costs are more and more determined by distance-insensitive activities such as corporate overheads and billing. With tariff re-balancing, an incumbent is slowly but steadily pricing itself out of the market, as its share of the pie becomes ever smaller: while you are busy fixing one slice of the pie, another starts eroding.

At some point, you just have to change the way you play your game, and this is why by now all incumbents have some kind of VoIP service in their portfolio. Interestingly enough, all go for a full-blown VoIP approach on foreing markets, e.g. Telecom Italia in Germany or France Télécom in Italy.

VoIPUnplugged.com

MeruNetworks is launching VoIPUnplugged.com, a site dedicated to co-ordinate industry efforts to establish best practices for wireless VoIP (note: they are not limiting it to VoWiFi). MeruNetworks says that partnering is the way to promote the spread of wireless VoIP. They break the ecosystem down into partner categories of integrators, infrastructure, management, security, voice and service providers (see also article on Wi-Fi Planet).

Reminds me a little bit of how industry cooperation helped the Hayes command set to become the industry standard for dial-up modems: you by-pass industry certification bodies and their time-consuming approval cycles, take something that works, and simply make it work even better.

Prospects for VoWiFI

ComputerWeekly.com has a nice article about the opportunities and challenges for VoWiFi and names a number of industry players from the VoWiFi value chain.

Xelor receives $6 million funding for next release of IP telephony software

Xelor Software Inc., a provider of service quality management products and services for IP communications, completed a $6 million Series B round of venture capital to hire more staff in preparation for its IP telephony software release at the end of the month (via VentureWire - requires subscription). Xelor hasn't updated its homepage yet with the press release, you might want to check later. Xelor is backed by three Australian VCs: Foundation Capital, Technology Venture Partners and Starfish Ventures.