Yoomba joins the VoIP me-too dead

Oh, Yoomba, we hardly knew you. To be honest, we didn't know you at all until VentureBeat declared you had shut your doors. "Looks to me like it's just another IM/VoIP client, but with an auto-add-all-your-contacts-and-spam-them `feature.'," said one user quoted by PC Week of Canada in 2007.

Funded by Global Catalyst Partners and US Venture Partners and with 20 employees at one point, Silicon Valley-based Yoomba had the typical profile of the me-too VoIP app crowd - the "disruptive approach," being able to send and receive phone calls and IM through email programs, off-shore development centers (Israel) and so forth. Unlike most of the me-too crowd, Yoomba apparently didn't get to the "dial-out to the PSTN/cheap long-distance minutes" phase of the plan before they ran out of money.

Looking back through Google News, the service reportedly racked up a user base of 500,000 people less than a month after a mid-July launch, but it doesn't look like they managed to hold onto any of them for monetization. There's also the cloud over how Yoomba might have signed up those folks, since early users complained the service spammed their entire contact lists in an aggressive opt-in approach.

Yoomba latest in wave of VoIP closures

Yoomba, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based company that let users send and receive phone calls and instant messages through their email programs, has shut its doors, reports VentureWire — continuing the trend of VoIP consolidations and failures that has emptied a once crowded space.

There was a fairly salient flaw in Yoomba’s business model — users could only call others who had downloaded the program, and its market share just wasn’t big enough to make it work.

The company, which has already taken down its web site, had taken undisclosed funding from Global Catalyst Partners and US Venture Partners.

Jaxtr India Numbers shutdown (illegal usage)

Jaxtr launched it’s VoIP service in India, around 7 months back and the service has now been shutdown due to illegal usage.

This is what Jaxtr mail reads as:

We have been informed that the Indian Department of Telecommunication has disabled all our local jaxtr numbers in India. Any call placed using one of these disabled numbers will not be connected. We are working very hard to reactivate these numbers so we can continue offering you our excellent services. We apologize for any inconveniences and will let you know as soon as the issue has been resolved. Should you have further questions, please contact our Customer Support department at: support@jaxtr.com. - The jaxtr team

Strange that Indian govt. took 7 months to figure out that Jaxtr’s India number isn’t legal? Or simply that they were losing a lot of money and shut it down themselves ...