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.

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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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There are scores of companies focused on connecting people on the Internet. But what about people without computers, or prefer to communicate by phone?

Ccube, in Cupertino, CA, is making it easier for billions of people without computers to communicate. To use the CCube Service, one only needs a phone. after a brief web-based signup process – which will not be necessary in future versions of the service, all search and conversation will be phone-based.

I spoke with Ccube CEO, Mahesh Lalwani to learn more about the service and how Ccube is different from other anonymous calling services.

Lalwani started out the conversation by mentioning Tom Friedman’s book, A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, in which Friedman talks about 10 “flatteners� that have leveled the global playing field.

Lalwani thinks Click, Call, Connect, the concept behind CCube, is another flattener to add to Friedman’s list. Ccube combines Lalwani’s speech technology and telcom experience to make matching and finding people based on shared interests extremely simple.

Putting together a working anonymous calling system is not difficult. What’s interesting about CCube is that anonymous calling is just the beginning.

There are two primary differentiators between Ccube and other high-end anonymous calling systems. One is the features.  Concepts like call windows are useful when scheduling times you are available to talk throughout the, making it easy of the service without worrying about someone calling you at 2am.

Trying to win the anonymous calling arms race based on features is an uphill battle. The signup process needs to be dead simple and the value proposition clear to users right up front. Then it’s up to the marketing and business development team to go partner with as many communities as possible.

Or in CCube’s case, throw out a free ‘Call Me On Ccube’ widget that gets  embedded in web pages, blogs, email and classified ads and let the users come to you. Building the Ccube community around a web-based, and soon phone-based directory of people. This is a much different model than say Jangl, which is relying on Match to drive adoption via the same “call me” buttons used by Ccube. (Update: Jangl is now the number 2 service on Facebook.)

The ability to search for people by keyword, geographic location, interest or other attribute is the real value of Ccube. Listening to audio descriptions of sofa’s on Craigslist or brunettes over 5’5″ within 100 miles is where Ccube really shines. Match.com had voice profiles years ago and Craigslist may allow some anonymous calling services but Ccube is a meta- directory where categories of daters, sellers and affinity groups can find each other.

Ccube currently offers both free and subscription levels of service for US phone users, including:
Free – 30 minutes per month
$7.00 – 250 minutes per month
$20.00 – 1000 minutes per month

Bring in one friend and receive 10 minutes in addition to the free 30 minutes.

Ccube is a small startup which needs funding and lots of traffic in order to succeed. From what we know so far, Ccube’s success could be a phone call or two (million) away.

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Over the years, dating sites like Match.com have toyed with audio and video on profiles. Impediments included the need for special infrastructure, i.e special phone numbers to call into, or developing applications to record low quality video from sub megapixel webcams. And who do you know that had a webcam in 2003?

With ever-falling bandwidth prices, I see dating sites swinging the pendulum back to multimedia profile and messaging to increase member-to-member communication, fight scammers and increase the stickiness of their sites.

Several factors support this supposition. Fortunately, adding multimedia to profiles gets easier every year. Flash-based recording and display applets are easily embedded into profiles, which negates the need for special phone numbers, recording and playback systems. Recent Apple laptops come with built-in cameras and webcams from Logitech (slowly but) steadily increasing in megapixels.

Companies like Userplane (ed: advertiser on this blog) and Jangl are leading the pack of member communications tools, and it wouldn’t take much effort for them to offer audio/video modules easily embeddable in dating site profiles.

An anonymous calling company recently contacted me to see what I thought about their new service. Evidently there are a lot of people who have figured out how easy it is to start these services, and while there are various flavors of back-end technology powering them, the user experience is about the same for all of them.

At first I blew the company off. I get these emails all the time, and reviewing anonymous calling services is about as exciting as waiting for your profile photos to be approved on Match. Unless it’s Jangl, which is major coolio in terms of the system and how it works.

After receiving another email from what I take must be their PR department, I finally got around to checking out 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.

I’ve written about anonymous calling overload, ’nuff said.The reason I’m mentioning Jaxtr is that it could turn out to be an unauthorized parasitic service that ends up the Photobucket of the dating world.

If you haven’t heard about Photobucket, videos from the site were recently  blocked by Myspace, who suddenly felt the need to flex it’s muscle when it found out Photobucket was up for sale, according to TechCrunch.

Most dating sites try to strip out anything remotely resembling a url. Perhaps Jaxtr can figure out a way to circumvent this limitation, without partnering with dating sites I don’t know how this would work.

It seems like Jangl or Userplane are much better suited to offering these services. They are technologically proven, have partnerships with large dating sites and understand the needs of the industry and it’s members. Maybe Jaxtr can partner with niche or adult sites.

Online dating is an inherently voyeuristic endeavor which benefits greatly  from the additional dimensions of  audio and video, whether it be in member-to-member communication or profiles.

We’re all tired of staring at bad photos and reading boring profiles. Time for dating sites to take a page from the social networking playbook and allowing members to embed videos and audio from Youtube or other (un)sanctioned sources.

Related posts:

1. The Rise Of An Underground Facebook Market
2. The Rise of Freeconomics: PlentyOfFish and OkCupid
3. Twitter Brings Richness, Depth and Immediacy to Dating Profiles

Collaboradate has a new blog.

Spark Networks 10-k, lots of financial info, including picking up Schmooze-a-Palooza for $50k. This document should be required reading for anyone in the dating business. If you are about to launch a new dating site, make sure to read “Risk Factors, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.” If that doesn’t scare the beejeezus out of you and make you want to go back to your day job, and you have a few million in the bank, have at it. Otherwise, pat yourself on the back for having a good idea and move on.

Lattice models and the Black-Scholes-Merton formula… are one thing, just don’t forget, Spark is $38 million in debt  accumulated deficit.  It costs a lot more to run a dating site than most people think.

Lot’s going on at Jangl, the company that provides anonymous calling services to Match.com. New website, widget to embed in profiles, blogs, websites, etc. A video of their Spring VON presentation.

OPW ranks online dating sites based on success stories. I don’t get it. How do we know these are real people? Without authenticity, the numbers mean little.

PerfectMatch deploys fraud detection solution. Hey, we’re big enough to get hacked.

Related posts:

1. Dating Insider Links 10-22-10
2. Online Dating Links For 8-28-09
3. Friday 6-6 Links

Enjoying the nice traffic spike from the link from the New York Times True.com article.

Lots of IT-related posts about dating sites recently. Today, Level 3 announces it has launched an Internet-based phone service for online dating service Lavalife. Lavalife, which has more than 600,000 active members, assigns dedicated phone numbers to customers so they don’t have to hand out their own number to a virtual stranger. Previously, several other carriers were utilized.

Who uses dedicated numbers anymore? This seems ineffective compared to how Jangl works with Match, which has come up with a slick systems for allocating and provisioning numbers for members.

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