Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Among the legions of legitimate domain holders on the internet are a band of squatters that make a living from holding corporate trademarks hostage.  These folks look to snatch the identities of companies by registering domain names that use or mimic that corporations trademarks.  Then they ransom these names back to the owner of that identity, sometimes for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. 

That's what we thought had happened last week when we discovered that someone had claimed iotum.mobi.  Because the domain was anonymously registered, Howard asked the .mobi registrar to send email to the owner, which they did.  Shortly after, he got a reply.

The owner, it turns out, was a "wannabe geek" (in his own words) named Kevin Billingsly.  An Indiana steel worker, he also runs several small businesses on the side, including a PC repair business and a promotional products company called ePowerServe, LLC that does embroidery, screen printing, vinyl prints, and other kinds of graphic arts products.  Kevin had a vision for a mobile search engine — a small lightweight application which would be the single place for people to search from mobile devices.  He thought iotum might be a good name for such an engine, and registered it… in October.

He could have held us hostage.  He could have forced us to jump through hoops with the registrar, in hopes that the registrar might agree that we did, in fact, own the iotum name.  He could have done a lot of things to make life difficult.  Instead, he simply asked where he should transfer the name, and by way of explanation added that he didn't think he had any right to it given how long we had been in business.  What an incredible act of honesty, integrity and generosity! 

From the team at iotum: Thank you, Kevin Billingsly.  And if we need any graphics work done, we'll be sure to give you a call. 

Has anyone noticed that the Jajah PR machine seems to have suddenly come back to life?  From late May of last year, when they announced their $20 million series B financing, the company has been silent.  Now, suddenly, in the last week we have:

1. A strategic relationship with Jangl, where Jangl taps into Jajah's global network, and pushes Jajah advertising.
2. A new Jajah Direct product, which allows them to compete with services like TalkPlus and Mobivox.

It's good to see one of the original Voice 2.0 companies wake up again after such a prolonged silence.  

Jajah announced their new Jajah Direct service this morning.  In a nutshell, now you can have dial-in numbers to make Jajah calls.  It completely removes the need to have a computer.  You simply pick up the phone and call a local number, enter the number of the person you wish to reach internationally, and the call proceeds.  It's cheap… or best of all, it's free if you're both Jajah users.

Luca Filigheddu points out that others are doing this already. It was inevitable that Jajah would also launch such a service, since the economics of running this kind of service are much more compelling than the call back model that they began with.  In the world of call-back, Jajah must pay for termination on both legs of the call.  Using this new model, it's highly likely that they pay for termination on only one leg since there are many flat-rate origination services available now.

It's a good move for Jajah, but it's unfortunate that dial-in numbers are available in such a small number of markets — just the USA, UK, Germany, Italy, Austria and Israel.  For now, I intend to continue to use Mobivox since they've provided a local Ottawa number for me to call. 

UPDATE: The Thanksgiving promotion was so successful, that we're DOING IT AGAIN! Anybody making a call using FREE Conference Calls of at least 5 minutes between now and midnight New Years Eve is eligible to win. 

FREE Conference Calls on Facebook is already a great service, with thousands of people signed up to use it.  Now we've made FREE even better.  If you use the FREE Conference Call service on Facebook between 12:01 AM on November 16th, and 11:59 PM on November 26th, and your call is five minutes or longer, then we'll automatically enter your name in a drawing to win an 8G iPod Touch.  Details here. 

So if you're unable to visit with all your family and friends this Thanksgiving holiday, why not organize a FREE Conference Call?

A big thank you to my friends who helped to get the word on this promotion out yesterday.  Late last night ISPs between my home and Dallas Texas finally figured out why I was blocked from reaching my own site and corrected the problem.  Hat tip to Daemon Welch-Abernathy (who writes Phoneboy, The Gadgets Weblog, The VoIP Weblog), Ken Camp, Pat Phelan, Luca Filigheddu and Aswath Rao… to name just a few!