I just read about Jaxtr, a company that lets users make free calls generated by a widget on their myspace profiles. It lets users take private phone calls from myspace visitors, without revealing their phone numbers. While I think this is cool, I don’t really find it that useful and I doubt that it will really take off.
But it does validate some thoughts Brian and I had about the direction of Call True (one of my startups, you can read about my past here) last year. We thought there were two really interesting applications of our product that held a lot of potential, both of which Jaxtr seems to be acting on. 1.) Anonymous calling for first time chatters, especially beneficial for dating sites. Imagine speaking with someone you may want to go on a date with from say match.com, and realizing it’s a total disaster…and you would wish you hadn’t ever given them your phone number (or revealed it through callerID). Instead our service would allow you to click the button and generate an anonymous call between you and the other person (on your cell phone,etc) before moving things any further. That way if the call was not something you enjoyed, you could easily block that user from ever calling again just as you do now with myspace mail etc. I spent a few months hounding a biz dev guy over at eharmony without making too much progress. Still think it can work 2.)Email click to call….We had this feature but didn’t really sell it….and it got a lot of attention. It’s really nothing more than email signature with a little html in it, but people seem to think it’s really cool and far more complicated than it really is. It’s a great tool for sales people to put in their email signature files because it tempts visitors to call, all they have to do is click and enter their number…and bam they’re connected. I would say that email signature with click to call generated more interest than really anything else we tried. It seems jaxtr is offering that as well. It all comes down to execution. We certainly had the ideas and the talent to make both of these things above come true, but we struggled going in all 10 directions we were tempted by. Lesson learned…focus then execute.powered by performancing firefox
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