Jangl Raises $7M To Enter Anonymous Calling Market

July 19th, 2006 · 5 Comments

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Jangl Anonymous phone calling services continue their attempts to penetrate the online dating market. Jangl is the latest company to enter the niche, raising an additional $7 million from Silicon Valley firm Cardinal Venture Capital. The round included Storm Ventures and Labrador Ventures, the two firms that first led a $2 million round into Jangl last year.

Jangl is YAAPS, Yet Another Anonymous Phone Service. There are so many players in this space, it’s not entirely clear to me why VC would unleash $9 million on a company with little to differentiate itself from competitors and initially focused on the dating market.

I’ve talked about anonymous calling many times in the past: Anonymous Calling, Background checks = FUD, Skype Will Own Part Of Click-To-Call Market, Vivox, the next big thing in online dating?

For dating, Yahoo, MSN and Skype provide plenty of anonymous calling features, and with an installed base of hundreds of millions, why wouldn’t people use their existing IM client?

For e-commerce, user verification is important, something existing IM clients do not offer. Still, quite a niche in a crowded marketplace. I will withhold further judgement until I see the Jangl Myspace widget.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the major telco carriers offered anonymous calling capabilities in the future, it’s a step further than blocking caller ID and just another line item in your monthly bill.

GigaOM goes into detail about Jangl and Silicon beat has more on the the company and the funding.

Technorati Tags: anonymous+calling, jangl

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5 responses so far ↓

1 Julia Dorofeeva (Check me out!) // Jul 19, 2006 at 4:50 pm
This feature is rather popular nowadays.

Not long ago (10th of July) Userplane has announced about its unique Anonymous Calling feature has triggered more than 20,000 calls worldwide during the past 60 days.

There was also a small survey within Online dating site users ran by Gordon Smith (www.gordonsmith.co.uk- this is not an ad, just a research) on whether they would be interested in an anonymous telephone calling service.

Anonymous telephone calling: Would you use a service that allowed you to talk to a potential date over the phone, without them knowing your phone number and without you knowing theirs?

* Sounds brilliant - I would definitely use this 967 (26%)

* I would consider it 1267 (34%)

* Sounds good but too complicated for me 152 (4%)

* Pass - I’m not interested 1171 (32%)

* Don’t understand it 138 (4%)

As you can see there’s a market for this service and I suppose it should be popular as now. By the way, how would you answer the servey question?

I suppose positively ;) A growth of this niche proves its importance.
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2 Andy Arnott (Check me out!) // Jul 19, 2006 at 7:54 pm
This one really confuses me. It just proves that VC’s are back to just throwing money around. Just like Dave says there are just too many better alternatives that are already popular, and not limited to just dating (like skype). Why re-invent the wheel, unless you are going to give them some spinners…
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3 Bill Broadbent (Check me out!) // Jul 21, 2006 at 9:07 am
Amazing Dave and a great acronym. Their site even has the feel of DateNumber which pretty much all the players in the industry got to see and they gained no traction. I imagine the VC’s think there is some viral component as did DateNumber. DateNumber (gNumber) didn’t make it work, adapted, and completely shifted their business to enabling eBay transactions (a killer ap in a huge market). Maybe Jangl figured it out, but I am personally doubtful.
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4 Michael Cerda (Check me out!) // Jul 25, 2006 at 4:35 am
Dave and Andy - Maybe there’s a whole lot of differentiation. Maybe there’s something the VCs know-that you don’t.

Bill - We have traction, lots of traction.

I urge all of you to watch this play out and reserve your conclusions.

-mc
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5 relaxedguy (Check me out!) // Jul 25, 2006 at 9:06 am
Michael, keep us in the loop, interested to hear more about this traction and differentiation.
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