The place João Bordalo calls home

Jajah

Posted by bordalix Tue, 04 Apr 2006 15:50:00 GMT

Just found jajah.com, and brother, this must be the easiest way to use VoIP. Just enter your phone number, and the number you want to call to. Your phone will ring, pick it up, and wait for the other party to answer. That easy, no need for headsets, no download, no installation.

Rates are higher than Skype, and it always will, since they have to pay for two termination fees. And they are not all that competitive, see it for the portuguese market:

Origin	Destination	Rate
Fixed line	Fixed line	€0.03
Fixed line	Mobile	€0.20
Mobile	Fixed line	€0.19
Mobile	Mobile	€0.35

Note: all in network advantage is lost, so a call between two mobiles belonging to the same operator will also pay €0.35 per minute.

Update: Thanks to Joel for pointing Voipstunt, a VoIP service which allow free calls to land lines.

Tags voip | 4 comments

News dump II

Posted by bordalix Thu, 05 Jan 2006 16:11:00 GMT

While printing (in recycled paper) a lot of Rubyonrails tutorials, some random cruising alerted me for some links and news:

The last days where fertile in new search engines, all of them pitching that are better than Google. Well, see it for yourself, by trying Lexxe and Previewseek;

Cingular as reached an agreement with PC manufacturer Lenovo to include HSDPA capabilities in their laptops. This way, ThinkPad owners will have wireless access to the Internet in the US and 90 other countries, either by Cingular's HSDPA or EDGE own network, or by Cingular roaming agreements;

Skype will announce WiFi and Internet phones at CES this week. A logic step from Skype, going to the hardware market, just like Apple and the iPod revolution;

Still on the VoIP world, O'Reilly decided to license his book about Asterisk under the Creative Commons license, making it free to download and distribute. You can download it here.

Tags google, hsdpa, skype, voip | no comments

The future is sooner than we expected

Posted by bordalix Fri, 04 Nov 2005 15:41:00 GMT

Three news worth notice:

The newest player to arrive at the webOS arena is Microsoft. The old giant unveiled is web strategy, launching is Live program: a personalizable website, with a lot of Ajax and a cool concept, Windows Gadgets; a new webmail application, which mimics Outlook in a browser (have to see this working); a new messenger, with VoIP integrated and ability to call for any fixed line in world; and Office Live, which is not an online version of Office, but a set of free, ad supported, productivity business tools;
Sun announces services to convert Microsoft Office docs to Open Office compatible format. There is nothing special with this announcement, Sun is following the OpenOffice path. The thing is, this is a service to be offer by Sun Grid Utility, which is Sun's vision of the future, "the network is the computer". Or in other words, applications will be web based, all you need on your side is a browser and a web server running in our PC for local access to information, as stated by Jason Kottke;
Google has filed a patent to serve search results based on user profiles. That means that Google will start to work on all the information they have about us, like what are we searching for, what are the websites we visit most, and what are our social networks. It's a good idea to have Google showing me the links I care most, but this arise a lot of privacy concerns. For a peek on where this could lead us, watch epic.