Jajah and Intel's VoIP patents

Jajah and Mig33 along with EQO are recent recipients of sizable new financing rounds in the hot mobile VoIP space.  The success of Jajah with more than 2 million users and Mig33 with an estimated 4 million users is an early indication of the market potential for voice calling services untethered to the PC. This land grab for market share also lends itself to staking early claims on patents and intellectural property ownership on a broad range of technology areas.

As some of the recent blogs noted, the Intel investment in Jajah will provide Jajah with access to Intel’s broad portfolio of VoIP patents. Many of Intel’s VoIP patents are likely accumulated through previous investments such as Dialogic and Trillium. For Jajah, the access to Intel’s patent portfolio and distribution channels definitely gives them more options to deploy the Jajah service on more embedded consumer terminal devices.  However, Intel’s softphone patent is unlikely going to have any impact on Skype or most other PC-based VoIP clients such as Counterpath’s X-Lite. A patent is only defined by its claims and Intel’s softphone patent specifically relates to desktop PC-based VoIP client used with a PBX system. Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) technologies are obviously not new as enterprise PBX vendors such as Nortel, Avaya, Cisco, Siemens Enterprise, and NEC have been deploying such solutions for a long time. With the recent US Supreme Court decision on patentability, one wonders how the Intel patent which was filed in 1999 would actually hold up in court. It would also be interesting to see how the Intel softphone patent plays out for open source PBX solutions such as my beloved Asterisk, and how Vonage will eventually settle the patent infringement case with Verizon.