Yoomba says it has made calling a friend as simple as sending an
email, with no special registration or phone numbers to recall. One
click on a hyperlink invitation from a friend and you can start
talking for free.
Underlying the service is a form of peer-to-peer technology that
turns personal computers into contributors to a phone network. Users
just need a PC and telephone headset.
Computer-to-computer calling works by sharing network bandwidth among
users, similar to how existing services like Skype work, said Yoomba
chief executive Elad Hemar.
"Up until now, various instant messaging services have been closed
systems," said Hemar, who co-founded Yoomba. "We allow you to
communicate with all your email contacts by bringing them into one
place," he said.
Yoomba software lets users call anyone with an email address that
works in Outlook, Outlook Express, Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or
Google Gmail. It soon plans to add other email services and social
network mailing lists.
"This is the new Internet. It's not the separate, walled-off Internet
of the portals anymore," Hemar said. "We've taken the only universal
online network - email - and built our service on top of it."
The 20-employee company, which was started in Herzelia, Israel, is
now based in Menlo Park, California, in the offices of one of its
venture capital investors.
Yoomba has taken several million dollars in financing from U.S.
Venture Partners and Global Catalyst Partners. Exact terms were not
disclosed. It is the biggest ever pre-product launch investment in an
Israeli Internet company, Hemar said.
The past year has seen the proliferation of dozens of companies
offering free or low-cost ways to place Internet calls via computers,
regular phones or mobile phones. But virtually all require some level
of change in user behavior.
Yoomba asks a caller to type a contact's email address into a box on
their site and click a few buttons to initiate a call. Missed calls
go to voicemail. Many set-up steps required by similar services are
handled automatically by Yoomba.
"If you have my email address, you can call me," Hemar said. "You can
call people who aren't even part of Yoomba."
For the first call, there is an initial pause as Yoomba software
reaches out to install itself inside the sender's email application.
Recipients receive an email with an embedded link. Click on the link
and a call begins shortly.
Once a user starts using Yoomba, small buttons appear inside Outlook
or Gmail to show when friends are online.
The technology is designed for consumers but also can sneak through
corporate firewalls into office networks. Yoomba is working on
control features to allow corporate technicians to manage Yoomba
traffic inside their networks. Readers can try a trial version of the
service at http://www.yoomba.com/.
No personal information ever leaves the user's program as Yoomba
software is designed to work inside it. Hemar said the company has
applied for several patents.
Users cannot import that instant messaging buddy lists into Yoomba's
service but since most people have e-mail addresses for their
contacts, this is unlikely to be an issue.
Eventually, Yoomba aims to introduce a new form of interactive
advertising to support the service.
That invitation, counter-intuitive as it may seem, is what Israeli
start-up Yoomba Ltd. said it will allow consumers to do via an online
service that enables instant-messaging and Web-based calling to
anyone with email.