Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas and Happy holidays to everyone. This has been a wonderful year for me. It was a very depressing year for me last year. It was very painful to see many of my friends/colleagues loose their jobs, market was going south and there was no hope. I’m glad things are picking up. Hope 2010 turns out to be a good year for all of us. Happy holidays and enjoy the moment. Time for wine,beer and scotch.

O2 gobbles Jajah for $200 million

Update: Its confirmed, Jajah bought for $207 million

O2 won the bidding war to buy Jajah , the web based click to call VoIP startup. Earlier techcrunch had reported a bidding war to buy jajah , which included Microsoft and Cisco. Its surprising that O2 won the bidding war and not one of these other giants Microsoft/Cisco. It would have been a great fit for jajah to be with Microsoft/Cisco instead of an operator. I don’t know why an operator who already has its own network would buy a VoIP click to call startup.

Jajah was founded way back in 2005 and has been doing quite good. It has raised a total of $35 million dollars so far from the likes of Intel, Sequoia and Deutsche Telekom. According to sources, jajah serves over 25 million consumers and business callers in more than 122 countries. In addition, Yahoo messenger with 100 million users uses Jajah for Voice calls. Lately, the M&A activity are heating up including Google buying Gizmo. So it’s definitely a good news for lot of startups. I’m surprised why Google did not try to bid for Jajah. With Google getting into the Voice arena, jajah would have been a good fit. Microsoft’s bid for jajah was to bolster their enterprise UC offering. Google could have done the same thing with Google Wave/UC combo for enterprise. More later, Stay tuned!

Google Phone is Real!

Google Phone called Nexus One is all over the blogosphere. It’s been a crazy weekend for gadget blogs, it’s just Google Phone. According to many sources, Google will be selling unlocked GSM phone directly to the consumers. The phone called Nexus One was designed inside Google and manufactured by HTC will be sold without any partnership with operators like iPhone and other Droid’s. Google has started giving away these phones to some of its employees . This pushes Google more into the mobile arena, which is going to be hot for advertisement in coming years.

As the focus of internet is moving towards mobile phones, Google is aggressively moving into the mobile arena. With Google Voice and the recent purchase of AdMod and Gizmo, Google is preparing itself to be the leader in the mobile advertisement.

Will this be an iPhone killer? Though I have not seen the phone, I still doubt it will be an iPhone killer. Will there ever be a true iPhone killer? Yes, only from Apple. In the meanwhile the count of iPhone killer phones keeps increasing.

Apple tablet coming soon

Looks like Apple tablet will be available sometime first quarter next year. This is definitely good news to all the tablet fans. So this should be a bad news to all the existing tablet vendors like Amazon, Sony, Microsoft and off course the JooJoo( iam not sure if this is gone fly with so much of bad publicity). According to sources, the tablet is a 10.1 inch multi-touch display using the iPhones LTPS LCD technology. Iam guessing it will have all the goodies like WI-FI,picture,video,mic,camera etc. Apple is also in negotiation with lot of publishers to distribute their contents. With more than 100,000 applications and growing more and more, this will be the most anticipated device of 2010.


I have been using iPhone for couple of weeks now and this is one of the best gadgets I have owned so far. This is no doubt a revolutionary product. Infact I have become a Mac fan after I started using iPhone. Mac simply rocks!. With tablet, apple is sure to set a new benchmark in the tablet market. The downside of the tablet could be its pricing, which is expected to be in the range of $1000 dollars. Let’s hope we can see another revolutionary product from apple next year first quarter. Till then, enjoy using iPhone.