Jajah Gets Interesting with Yahoo Deal

As Yahoo seems to be going through makeover in the midst of its takeover fight, the company said it will replace the fairly lame Internet voice piece of Yahoo Messenger with a service powered by Jajah.

Much of the general public will say, "What the &*#*! is Jajah?" Short answer: It's a competitor to Skype, with some big-time backing from Intel. But Jajah for the past year has offered a compelling service that allows you to use Jajah to make international calls from a regular phone by first connecting to a local phone number. More description here.

Jajah is a true world-is-flat kind of start-up -- founded in Austria, it has main offices in Silicon Valley and Luxembourg and a development center in Israel. The Yahoo deal should give Jajah the boost it needs. The Jajah Web site boasts about its 10 million users -- but really, for a global Web service these days, 10 million users makes you a below-the-radar player. Yahoo Messenger has 97 million users. Skype claims more than 300 million users.

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