Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Widely reported yesterday, Truphone scored a small victory in its fight with T-Mobile over access.  T-Mobile had chosen to block calls to Truphone numbers, arguing that Truphone was not a mobile operator (since it had no network of its own), and therefore T-Mobile shouldn't be required to pay mobile termination fees to Truphone.  You could still make a phone call from a Truphone enabled mobile phone, just not receive one.  A London judge yesterday agreed to grant injunctive relief to Truphone, and required T-Mobile to pass calls pending a trial or some other extra-legal agreement between the companies.

Scrappy Truphone CEO James Tagg positions this as a victory for consumers.  For Truphone, however, this is a life or death issue.  Being allowed to participate in the rich stream of mobile termination fees vs T-Mobile's prior offer of fractions of a cent is what makes it possible for Truphone to offer unlimited free calls to its customers via their wireless phones.  Fortunately for T-Mobile, the types of phones that Truphone can run on represent a relatively tiny portion of the market.  If Truphone was capable of running on any standard cell phone, they'd have a threat on their hands that they would need to deal with very quickly, indeed.

Green Technology is a personal interest of mine.  Whether it's saving money, or the environment, the wannabe scientist in me finds a certain elegance in green solutions ranging from LED lights to hybrid cars. The GigaOm teams newest venture - Earth2Tech - promises to be an authoritative voice on this burgeoning field.  Add it to your RSS reader!

Former Tello CEO Doug Renert dropped me a note yesterday to tell me about his new gig, an investment fund called Tandem Entrepreneurs.  In Doug's own words:

We built Tandem to address a startup landscape that’s transformed over the last couple of years. Traditionally, startups have required 15-20 people, two+ years and millions of dollars before they gain any significant traction. However, there’s now a class of startup that can, with a few people and a small pot of capital, get substantial user adoption in a matter of months. (sound familiar to you?)  Anyway, traditional forms of early capital are not structured to participate in these. The startups do not need the amount of money normally invested by these firms, and most would not see the kind of exits that traditional early capital consider viable.

We concluded that a different type of vehicle was needed for a new breed of founders, so we created Tandem. We invest our sweat and usually less than $1M in a startup over a period of 2 years working very closely with the founders during that time. We are all entrepreneurs; none of us is a VC.

The three founders are Doug Renert, Sunil Bhargava, and Joyo Wijaya.  Judging from their bios, they must have all met at Oracle.   They work alongside the founders contributing time and expertise to ensuring that the business can succeed.  To date, they've raised $15M, with which they hope to be able to support 6 to 8 businesses per year.  Their concept is very much like an incubator, but they invest in businesses rather than employees that might grow into businesses. Doug says, "When we get involved, we put in slightly less than $1M and work with the founders for two years.  We're the only money in typically, and our goal is to get the business to significant market traction with a liquidity event as an option in that time."

It's a good concept, and fits a very underserved part of the capital market.

The Jajah team pulled off a bit of a coup yesterday, announcing a relationship with eHarmony which will see the dating site deploy Jajah click-to-call buttons on users profiles.  The idea is that users will be able to click and have an immediate call with a potential relationship interest.

As the Red Herring article points out, it is these kinds of new services that are the future of voice, and not commodity service.  In this case, the Jajah API (which apparently few companies know about) is being used to weave telephony into the basic business processes of eHarmony.  The services stack has flipped upside down. Where voice calling, in a Voice 1.0 world, was the application, in a Voice 2.0 world the application is the application (dating, in this case) and Voice is simply a service supplied to the application.

Very cool.  Nicely done Jajah team.  It's a lesson that SunRocket should have learned.