Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Brian McConnell dropped me a line a couple of days ago to talk about the new Wordpress Plug-in for WorldWide Lexicon, his project to translate the web using human volunteers.  Toward the end of the conversation he also let me know that OCS (the company behind Radio Handi) would soon be acquired, but that he couldn't let me know who the mystery acquirer was… just yet!

The news is out this morning.  Radio Handi has been bought in a cash and royalties deal by hosted PBX provider Virtual PBX.  From the press release:

With this acquisition, Virtual PBX gains access to OCS' cross-platform telecommunications environment and expertise. This platform will add a wide range of VoIP, mobile, text, and mixed-media communication services to the Virtual PBX product line. By combining technologies from the two companies, Virtual PBX plans to provide a suite of virtual office telecommunications services that can be purchased separately or together, expanding existing markets for the company and enabling new market penetration. New offerings
based on this infrastructure will begin to appear by the fourth quarter of this year.

It makes sense.  Much of what OCS built could be very effectively targeted into the enterprise space, even though their focus with Radio Handi was consumer. 

Congratulations!

Things are getting a little frothy for JAJAH on the investment front.  With investments from Intel Capital and Deutsche Telekom, they're flush with capital.  Scanning the blogs yesterday, I came across this piece from Markus Göbel highlighting that Swiss investment firm Qino Flagship has increased their investment in JAJAH by another $1 million as well.  Most interesting was the quoted research from Austrian investment firm RRS Capital Strategies valuing JAJAH at $2.9 billion, based on comparatives with Skype at the time of the EBay acquisition of Skype.  That caused me to raise my eyebrows, I admit.

According to Google's mangled translation of the piece that Markus originally quoted:

RRS calculated now on basis of the user data and that multiple, to which the VoIP offerer Skype at the end of on of 2005 was sold ebay, for one fair VALUE of approximately 2.9 billion dollar for jajah.

It sure would be interesting to know how RRS arrived at this figure, given how different the companies are.  For example:

• Skype has 10's of millions of free users who never pay for anything.  Every JAJAH user is a paying customer, even if they don't pay a lot.   JAJAH ought to be much more profitable than Skype on a per user basis. 
• Skype makes a significant amount of revenue from royalties on hardware devices that incorporate Skype.  JAJAH has no such play, as Aswath Rao pointed out yesterday.

Even so, co-Founder Daniel Mattes claims the company is on a steep revenue ramp, and would be profitable today if they cut back their marketing.  He is even talking about an IPO. That would certainly turn heads, were it to occur.