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.