Information Engineer

Jajah announced that their managed service platform shall cater yahoo’s 97 million IM users. That’s freaking a lot of users and indeed a great achievement for jajah folks. This doesn’t include the already amassed 10 million users of jajah. This is just phenomenal. Compared to other Voice App startups that were solely building voice widgets for Social networking, jajah always stood out and showed how to make money. This announcement has been such a big deal that, every feed I read talked about jajah. It’s a jajah fatigue to me :-). Well, definitely worth it. I have been following jajah for quite sometime, these guys are just amazing. Did they invent rocket science? No! But, they built a product that users want to use and pay for.

I thought of looking at this whole platform from a different perspective. Off late, most of the startups have started building Voice and Messaging platform. Looks like building Voice and Messaging platform for other developers to leverage the platform is becoming the next hot thing. At least, it looks like that.

Here are some of the players that are supporting this kind of platform( I just picked some of the popular ones)
• Ribbit- Amphibian
• Jajah – jajah managed service
• Broadsoft - Broadworks platform

Ribbit provides a complete platform that can be used to build a mashup of voice and messaging application. I still don’t understand their claim of being the Silicon valleys first phone company. It’s a marketing gimmick that very few would buy it. These guys have built a carrier grade soft switch, which is approved/verified by Lucent. Using their flash libraries users can build voice and messaging Web apps. Apparently, some of the ribbit folks came from a soft switch startup, which explains their carrier grade soft switch pitch. They support both consumer (Amphibian) and enterprise model. For the consumer model, the revenue sharing deal seems interesting; 70% money developers take and 30% ribbit.

Jajah’s managed service has all the relevant modules to deploy any kind of voice and messaging applications. With the yahoo deal, jajah definitely leads the pack in this space. In fact, this is a good validation point for other startups trying to play the niche. I couldn’t get more information about the developer program for jajah managed service platform.

Broadsoft Xtended Developers Program provides and application development portal(Developers Broadsoft ) using which developers can create voice mashups. These mashups shall be made available to nearly 300 service providers in 56 countries and their six million customers through the BroadSoft Xtended Marketplace (Marketplace broadsoft). This looks like a Tall promise to me. Using this platform, developers have already built applications for facebook and salesforce. Selling anything to carriers is a herculean task. I would rather build something for consumers than carrier. Many of my previous startups closed down selling products to carrier. Alec has some good insight on this.

So who is going to be the winner in this space. Well, jajah already has a big lead with yahoo as their biggest customer. This definitely gives them a big leveraging point compared to other competitors. I guess it’s too early to predict the twitter of platform business. Nevertheless this is indeed a very good business strategy for startups that want to play a bigger role in the voice business. All that said, one thing is for sure, developers will have a bigger role to play for these platforms to succeed.

Some of the other startups playing the platform game are:
Lypp
TringMe
AOL open voice ( Boy, Alec has an interesting story about AOL open platform. After reading the article, I wouldn’t venture into doing anything with this platform. Thanks Alec)

Oh, BTW, some of the operators like BT Web21C are themselves playing the platform role. More on this later. Stay tuned