Great news for Craigslist sellers and psycho’s. RingShuffle is a new iPhone app for creating temporary and later self-destructing phone numbers that route to your cell, available now.

Seems like every piece of news I get lately is a re-hash of a product or service which has been done many times before. Redundancy is the engine of creation, right?

Related posts:

1. Mobile phone video dating
2. Here’s My Number (for Today)
3. gNumber launches Date Number

Just got off the phone with Joel Schwartz, who is busy getting ready to launch a voice-based social networking tool called Parlor.fm at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City.

Some of you may remember Joel from iDate in Miami a few years ago when he was at Teltech, which debuted it’s LoveDetect service. I absolutely loved that service but Teltech seems to have ended up focusing on spoofing caller ID and other telcom apps.

Parlor is a unique, voice-based social network featuring an array of interconnected mini-apps to suit a variety of business and social purposes. Parlor is integrating the quality and intimacy of voice communication with the high-speed connectivity of the digital world.

One reason I am partial to the idea of voice-based social networking is because I wrote a business plan outlining a VOIP-based social network based on Skype almost six years ago.

With nothing to test at Parlor yet, all we can do is debate whether or not people want to talk more on the phone, or less, and in what context. Much of what Parlor will do is already done by millions of people via Skype. So the question becomes, what can Parlor do better than Skype? Perhaps there is a value-added feature, or unintended consequence that will drive Parlor’s adoption rates.

Do 20-somethings want to talk on the phone to strangers? How about the over 50 crowd? Singles do this on late-night chat lines. Business people don’t want to be on the phone, it kills productivity in many cases. How would a business leverage voice? I see you on LinkedIn, I arrange to directly contact you or get a warm introduction, we email back and forth for a round and then move to a phone conversation. Would I do this on Parlor instead of or in addition to LinkedIn?

I haven’t had a fax machine or a landline for almost a decade and I almost exclusively use Skype or Facetime on iPhone. The idea of calling a phone number to chat with people in this day and age feels positively antiquated. Voice and video profiles, now there’s something. Perhaps there are enough people on the planet who would love to talk to each other and bring a bit of the Myspace discovery functionality to the networking-with-friends world of Facebook.

Maybe there are millions of people who want to talk about model trains or politics. I don’t know. What I do know is that Facebook will roll out some sort of voice feature in the near future, but that doesn’t mean that Parlor can’t find its footing in a specific age range, demographic, interest group or even dating.

I have worked with a number of VOIP and voice-based startups over the years. Most have had wins in business sectors and flailed in the consumer space. Something tells me that Parlor needs a video component to really catch the eye of consumers.

Dating sites, would you use something like Parlor to bring members closer together on your site?

Full Parlor.fm press release.

No related posts.

Last week I flew to LA for the iDate LA 2009 conference. This was my first flight on Virgin America and I definitely picked the right day to fly. Virgin offered free wifi and hosting Day In The Cloud with Google. Google Ambassador Paul was a few seats up and the LAX to SFO plane was full of tech media types.

Day In The Cloud is an online scavenger hunt, and quite a fun concept. Players were given an hour to answer 9 levels of questions, multiple questions per level, and a 10th bonus round where creativity counts. The idea of the hunt is to answer questions by using various Google Apps; spreadsheets, GTALK, Calendar and of course Google search . This proved far too difficult for me on 4 hours sleep and no caffeine. I ran out of time and had to skip 4 levels because I was frustrating myself with some of the puzzles, which appear to have been concocted by evil Google engineers who like to torment us non-Mensa types. This made me want to complain to the guy next to me, but he was busy making use of his shiny red Virgin America barf bag.

My score was not so hot, I climbed a miserable 5500 feet and need some schwag to compensate for my poor showing. One free t-shirt and an invite to Grand Central later, I felt better. You can Follow Day In The Cloud on Twitter at @dayinthecloud track the tag #dayinthecloud or better yet, play along on the ground at Day In the Cloud. I’m sure they’ll do something like this again, it was a lot of fun.

About flirting in airplanes. Virgin America has a cool seat-back entertainment system with games, shopping, music and much more. A lot of the features are not currently turned on for some reason. Of the ones that are working the one I like the most so far is the seat-to-seat chat and the chat room. Once I stopped using the wrong controller for the seat next to me and was able to join the general chat room, I was able to talk to a few people. I wouldn’t be against flirting with the woman a few seats up from me, who (I think) was checking me out in the boarding area.

On the way home on the red-eye I chatted up a few random people who joined the general chat room. We never acknowledge each other when we landed, probably because sleep-deprived semi-anonymous late-night chat falls under, “what’s said on the plane stays on the plane”. If you can’t sleep, chatting with random strangers is actually pretty cool.

You can order drinks and snacks from VA consoles, smooth and efficient. I will never fly another airline across country again if I can help it, VA puts all other carriers to shame.

I wish I had talked to 18C, she was single and cute. Talk about a great Craigslist Missed Connections: “You were there blonde, aisle seat, tray table was down, watching CNN. I was playing Mario Brothers, black laptop.” I wonder who the first people will be to get married after meeting in a Virgin Altantic chat room.

Related posts:

1. Match.com Partners with Virgin
2. Experience Toyboy Warehouse at 30,000 Feet
3. Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC Visits Chatroulette

I came across a service called Hello my number is.

HELLOmynumberis.com is a fun new way to meet people!

The process is simple. All you need to do is signup for an account, generate some Tag Numbers, and then anonymously give the Tag Numbers out to people you would like to meet. You can do this by creating your own Tags, or you can save yourself some time by ordering custom Tags through the site.

The custom Tags have everything you need to get going, including the website address, your Tag Number, as well as a quick note to the Tagee letting them know that someone would like to contact them.

If you’ve found one of our tags, it means that somebody wants to talk to you!

Maybe they think you’re cute and were too shy to say hi in person, maybe they had just missed you but didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to say something, or maybe they just wanted to give you a million dollars! Ok, so that last one is pretty far fetched, but you get the idea. The point is, somebody would like to talk to you!

To start the anonymous communication process, simply type in the tag number you received and click Start Communicating.

Simple interface and easy to use. I’ll have to hand out a few at networking events and on the street and see how it goes. Part of me wonders why one would go to all the trouble, especially when Moo cards can do this trick just as easily. Plus, plenty of companies have tried this in the past, and it went nowhere.

No related posts.

Beemask is an anonymous calling service looking to partner with dating sites. Geek.com wrote them up. Beemask is free, which I don’t understand. Didn’t they learn from Jangl and Match? I thought that perhaps anonymous calling would take off in the online dating space. It didn’t. People just pick up the phone and call each other.

No related posts.

Several executives at top dating sites have contacted me to discuss the effect the mass exodus of top management from Jangl would affect MatchTalk, which is powered by Jangl.

Today I heard back from Michael Cerda, founder of Jangl, about the current situation. Jangl was acquired by Live Universe and continues to power Match.com and Adult Friend Finder. Better than nothing but not very juicy, at least compared to the rumors I’ve heard surrounding how management deal with the company’s implosion. Sounds like management and a few engineers went to Jajah. and remaining employees are not very happy about how the deal went down.

Let me say that I was an early fan of Jangl and have used the service throughout it’s lifespan. Simple and cheap, what more can you ask for?

Audio services in the dating and social networking market have an inordinately difficult time getting traction in the marketplace. People don’t want to talk to each other, they’d rather send SMS, email or post to people’s Fun Walls. WooMe and SpeedDate may counteract this trend, but that’s how it’s been for at least several years.

TechCrunch did a piece a whole month ago which I just came across, Live Universe Picking Up Jangl’s Pieces. The TechCunch commenters, as usual, make several poignant points, yet also miss the mark when it comes to the value of Jangl services. Jangl removed a lot of the friction from the process of getting an anonymous Jangl number and making and receiving calls. g*Number and many earlier companies tried to do 80% of what Jangl accomplished, but Jangl got the signup process right. A shame really, I liked the service and thought they had a fighting chance in the dating market.

The TC commenters saying anyone with Asterisk (free open source telecommunications system) could duplicate Jangl quickly may be right, but Jangl’s ease of use was far ahead of other offerings. Most people complaining about how easy it is to build things probably haven’t even tried Jangl, let alone compared to it other anonymous calling services. It’s easy to take potshots from the comments.

To the TC commenter talking about their PR, I agree 100%. Tim Johnson is one of the best PR people in Silicon Valley, a true communications master, forgoing the smarmy PR flack BS that is so prevalent these days, especially from the myriad wet-behind-the-ears 24 year old PR associates at major dating sites call you Bruce when your name is Fred, for the fifth time already. I can count the number of PR people I look forward to hearing from on one hand, and Tim’s on that hand.

Mark Brooks was pushing a similar anonymous calling service last year. Not sure what happened to that company. I can think of at least six anonymous calling companies that are gone just in the past three years. Every one of them tried to get a foothold in the dating space, with little to show for it.

Then they sit back and lick their wounds, saying that they have shifted their focus to the much larger e-commerce market. “eBay or Craigslist will buy us, just watch.” If I had a nickel…

With Jangl, it’s a classic case of improper alignment of founders goals and investor experience. Raising money is straightforward. Finding friendly money is incredibly difficult. Many entrepreneurs go for the first deal that comes to them, refusing to wait for a better VC team to align themselves with. The value of a VC is much more than money.

Take it from someone trying to raise money for two companies. Everyone wants to hear your idea, and then they decline politely, at which point the terror sets in that some “Entrepreneur in Residence” at a VC is going to take your idea and run with it. So you go with the first money promised. BAD IDEA.

Jangl raised enough capital to build out their technology, but it sounds like they ran out of money before they could get serious traction in the dating and social networking space.

Guess having Match.com on PlentyOfFish as customers didn’t make them as much money as they expected. But then again, why did it take eight engineers to maintain the service?

Have you checked out Jajah? It used to feel more like a long distance phone call arbitrage play. Buy millions of minutes and resell them at a profit, after giving them away for a few years. Now there is a hot Asian girl on the home page kissing her phone.

I used Jajah to talk to my then-girlfriend last year when she was in Australia for a month. I never saw a bill on the my cell phone for a single call. Great service, but I never thought of it as an anonymous calling service.

In hindsight, eHarmony made the smarter play. They let Match deal with a protracted technology due diligence and integration period, with all the issues that pop up regardless of how well things are planned out for a new technology launch.

When I was on the team building a version of AOL for the Swedish government in 1995, our project was something like 10% of Netscape’s budget at the time. Once you sell someone on an idea, you actually have to make the code work. We bought the entire Netscape product line with the hopes that we could jury-rig the platform into something usable. At the time, that meant expensive Oracle consultants traveling to us from all over the world to help wrangle the Netscape code into something the customer would sign off on.

The stories I could tell from that project – $6 million dollars way back in 1995. The government even raised the price of stamps to fund the project. But I digress.

I’d love to know what the overall effort was to integrate Jajah with eHarmony. I suspect it was less resource intensive than that Jangl deal with Match.

I’m not going to talk about Michael Cerda’s leaving for Jajah because all I know is what I read, that some people are upset at how he bailed out and left Jangl to fend for itself, but who knows what really happened.

I hope that Match can salvage the situation and Live Universe can step up to the plate to keep the service going.

As for Jajah, they have 10 million customers at this point. Now who’s going to buy them? AT&T or Verizon? Scratch that, in a few years Verizon will offer anonymous calling and put the whole market out of business.

No related posts.

Jangl, which powers the anonymous calling feature on Match.com and several social networks, has expired. The founders are going to work for Jajah, which powers eHarmony’s anonymous calling service.

Sorry to hear the news, I like the Jangl team and their PR team was top notch. Hopefully Jajah will find a place for them where they can continue to build out their vision for Voice 2.0.

What does this mean for Match.com? When I click the “Talk to Her” link on a profile page it redirects me to the subscription add-on page which still says MatchTalk. Will the feature remain or will Match start using JahJah?

More at Online Personals Watch.

Related posts:

1. Catching up with Jangl and Lonelybloggers
2. What Happened to Jangl?
3. Jangl Raises $7M To Enter Anonymous Calling Market

Jangl and all the other anonymous calling services are preparing to insert advertising in the beginning, middle and end of calls routed through their system via partners like Bebo. I wonder how these plans may change now that Bebo is an AOL property.

I assume that Match members (Jangl powers Match anonymous calling) will not have to listen to “This call brought to you by the University of Phoenix.” (typical junk social networking ads.)

Are there other models for generating revenue from anonymous and free calling services? Embedding ads is the most obvious. I’m wondering about lesser obvious solutions. Thoughts?

What do you think the response is going to be for people who are not interested in the deluge of advertising that is going to come from anony calling services? Leave a comment and let us know.

Via TechCrunch.

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Social communications company Jaxtr has just released a new destination called Jaxtr Cafe. Jaxtr is creating a social network on the go, allowing you to participate in your favorite discussions while mobile. Jaxtr has successfully completed eleven months of beta testing and today released version 1.0 of its service. The centerpiece of the 1.0 release is Café Jaxtr, a place where users socialize around the question “What do you want to talk about?�

Recently I spoke with Jaxtr CEO (and LinkedIn co-founder) Konstantin Guericke. Konstantin was at Black Sun Interactive back when I was doing lots of Virtual Reality stuff in the mid-90′s, and I think we may have met at a conference in New York, small world indeed.

Talking about The Rise of Multimedia Dating Profiles in April of last year I said:

Jaxtr, a free anonymous calling service that takes a grammar hint from Jangl, and as an added twist, allows messages to be played back in web browsers. It’s G*Number a la 2003 all over again.

Like sites that aggregate profiles, anonymous calling and social communications companies pop up every few years, enjoying various degrees of success. Something tells me the current crop of anonymous/social voice services have the right timing, management teams, funding and technology in place to make a good run at the market.

Factoid: 90% phone conversation is staying in touch with people you already know.

Jaxtr Café especially piqued my interest due to the fact that I have a business plan summary sitting right here which is 99% of Jaxtr Café. I wrote the plan a few years ago when someone approached me about scheduling and participating in conversations using Skype. That idea didn’t pan out for various reasons, but I’m glad to see someone running with the concept.

I thought perhaps that Vivox or Jangl would have run with the idea by now, but it appears Jaxtr has run to the front of the pack.

According to TechCrunch, all 10 million Jaxtr members ares grandfathered in to Jaxtr Cafe’s profile database.

Let me make something clear here. To the uninitiated, it’s difficult to tell the difference between Jangl, Jaxtr and Jajah. Not only are the names similar, but they all offer anonymous calling services with additional social services presently, or planned, layered on top. Confusing.

In the dating space, Jangl partenered with Match and PlentyofFish and Jajah hooked up with eHarmony. A gold star to anyone who can tell me how many minutes these services are actually selling through dating sites. Most only talk about the number of members on the networks they have deals with.

Jajah started as a straight long-distance arbitrage deal. I called my ex when she was in Australia for a month, and I don’t think either of us was charged a cent. Thats was a loss leader business model until they started getting bigger deals. But they got eHarmony.

In case you didn’t think much about voice-based services, check out companies like TellMe, which Microsoft bought in 2007. Interesting point, TellMe founder Mike McCue worked at Netscape, and TellMe raised $239 million over four venture rounds. I met Mike in Silicon Valley in the mid 90′s when he sold Paper Software to Netscape. Paper Software provided the 3-D browsing capabilities in the Netscape browser. What’s with the 3-D guys getting into telephony?

Ok, enough history, back to Café Jaxtr.

Visitors can find people to talk to by topic or country and then click through to the jaxtr member’s live contact page. On the contact page, they can learn more about the member and view the online profiles the member may have on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or 15 other social networks and blogging platforms. Visitors can also review the topics the member is interested in talking about and call them using their regular landline or mobile phone. The member’s phone number stays private, and jaxtr’s PrivacyShieldTM gives members complete control over which callers can ring through to their phone and which get routed to the digital voicemail box that is included for free with their jaxtr service.

Why use a social tool like Jaxtr Café? There are hundreds of millions of people without computers who have mobile phones. They need their social networking too. All those people who know how to use a phone, and getting them to use any of the J’s should be pretty simple. And no download, like with Skype or Gizmo.

The Jaxtr Café features a directory of pre-set topics to choose from. This is a spin on WooMe, which still doesn’t work with my Mac, but they are fixing it this week.

Social conversations can be time, topic or location-based. Café Jaxtr does topic and location, whereas WooMe focuses on time and topic.

The Dating category features, you guessed it, a lot of beautiful people. I’m convinced that any site that has a gallery display of members hand picks each and every one, just like dating sites only display the gorgeous people on their home page.

I click through to J***an Lewis, who is 18-25 in the US. It’s strange to see people’s full names, but if that’s what they put at the top of their profile, so be it.

She is cute and has similar topical interests as I do. Ok, we don’t share any topics in common, but she is, as I said, cute. I am too scared to call her directly, so I’ll leave a text message, we’ll see what happens. Is there such a thing as a virtual restraining order? No worries, you can set your account to only receive communications from your friends.

We’ve just stumbled upon the main issue I have with the Cafe. It’s awkward to pick up the phone and call someone just because they list interests. Texting is much easier, especially for us old folks (over 30). Actually, now that I’ve made a few calls, leaving a voicemail is probably the way you’re going to get a response from people. I wonder which channel will get the best responses?

This is where my original idea, and WooMe, and Skype Live, to some extent, make more sense. It’s much easier to break the ice in a small group conversation than initiating one-on-one conversations. I’m surprised Jaxtr didn’t implement this from the start.

I left a message for someone named Laurie who showed up as my first friend on Jaxtr. I clicked on her widget to leave a message, and my phone rang and told me to start talking. Only problem was that the call was ended after about 15 seconds, so I got cut off mid-sentence, which was annoying.

I don’t see a true search capability, which would be nice. The search link takes you to a “find your friends” link, which asks you to import friends from your various address books. I have 1,000+ people in my Gmail address book, and now I have to scroll through all of them. Google, I wish we could have a hard-coded group of people to send viral requests like this.

Jaxtr uses Javascript links to display profiles, which is a pain when you want to open a bunch of profiles at a time and you can’t open them up in separate browser tabs.

Get jaxtr | Login

Speaking of going viral, Jaxtr goes viral through widgets posted on user profiles across the web.

For a standalone blog like this, the widget selection process is klunky and the widget code is not valid xhtml. However, for most people adding their widget to email, Facebook or hosted blogs, the widget embedding process is much smoother. I am a total outlier when it comes to services like this, I always have problems embedding stuff in my blog, or my particular situation is nothing that 99% of humanity is ever going to come across. Welcome to my world.

The Voice Blast feature is great. It’s a brief audio recording the person embeds in their widget on their blog, social network, or wherever. How soon will we see these Widgets on dating sites? Remember when Match had voice capabilities? I loved that, and this is even better.

Problem, I have no idea how to create a Voice Blast and there is no documentation in the support section. Can I get some help here?

Constantin finished up our discussion by talking about the online dating world. He totally gets what’s going on in the space.

Model of being a walled garden is understandable. At same time, web developed in amazing ways. Don’t try to hold onto users too tightly. Dating has moved from gardens to social nets and blogs. Scary to dating sites. Paywall as filter for serious daters.

Interesting factoid :2: Jaxtr VP Engineering is Taneli Otala, who’s previous gig was running the 100-person engineering organization at Various, Inc., owner of the FriendFinder conglomerate, which was recently bought by Penthouse for a reported $500 million.

Jaxtr Café could be a traffic driver for dating services, providing a new source of singles that may not necessarily gravitate directly to online dating.

Jaxtr Café is a step in the direction towards more realistic internet and mobile-based social communication.

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I’m near the Jersey Shore meeting with TelTech. They are demoing their LoveDetect, Liar and Spoof phone services. Fascinating technology and applications and the discussion about how dating and social sites could use the services has been interesting.

I have meetings all day Friday  in Manhattan. Nice to be back, it’s been a while. A few dating startups and an image processing company are on the agenda.

I expect we will see voice and image analysis on dating sites, the question is whether it will happen sooner or later? I certainly hope we don’t have to wait three years like we did for anonymous calling.

No related posts.