I thought I'd share a post by fellow Jadukan, Brock Marion...

After many internal discussions,

We expect the transition to occur around mid-June 2008 at which time the calling functionality of the current Earthcaller site will be turned down. We are working hard to make this transition as frictionless as possible and will provide an easy path for users to create their own Jaduka Labs accounts to use the new version. We will start encouraging current users to register early for a Jaduka Labs account to avoid the rush that will occur when the cutover takes place by updating our ad unit and messaging on Earthcaller within the next week.

Current Earthcalller users will need to create new Jaduka Labs user accounts to access and use the new version, but in doing so they will gain access to a much better free PC-to-phone application in almost every way. By registering, users will also have access to other Jaduka Labs apps, such as: dukaDIAL, dukaBAR, dukaLINK, and dukaBUZZ -- all great phone widgets in their own right. In short, Earthcaller users are not only getting a better PC-to-phone calling application, they are gaining single login access to other free and useful telephony apps and widgets!

OK, back to Earthcaller 2.0 -- this build has a new interface design that we really think users are going to like. Designwise, it is a play on the globe device we used in the Earthcaller logo and has a very organic, soft shape. I'd go so far as to say it looks very environmentally friendly, but I don't see us getting a LEED certification for Earthcaller anytime soon.

Regarding user experience and usability, Earthcaller 2.0 is a much more robust and useful application with some powerful new features. The new version leverages the saved contacts functionality of Jaduka Labs accounts, adding it to the Earthcaller 2.0 bag of tricks and builds upon it by adding one click speed dial buttons on the application interface. We even made it possible to assign graphic icons to your contacts for easier access.

By adding the ability for users to save their contacts for future reference as well as implementing speed dialing, we have really made this application much more useful for power users. I have a feeling these two features alone will create a huge new crowd of Earthcaller faithful. You would think these new additions would enable Earthcaller 2.0 to far surpass its sibling and it will, but we didn't stop there.

Also new to Earthcaller 2.0 are some testing tools. Why testing tools? Well, when you are talking about a VoIP application and PC-to-phone calls in general, connection speed, headsets, mics and speakers are part of the recipe to make these types of calls successfully.

To address these needs, we have created an integrated network speed test tool that users can access without ever leaving the application to confirm that they have a good connection to the Internet -- connection speed being the single most important element to confirm that a PC-to-phone call will be of high quality.

In addition, we are creating a simple integrated micraphone and speaker testing tool, allowing users to set their mic and headset volume levels prior to making calls. Both of these tools will live under the Earthcaller 2.0 application interface in convenient slide out panels, accessible with a click of the mouse, without ever leaving the application page. Pretty nifty!

And if you thought that was it for Earthcaller 2.0 new features, we also creating a floating call frame for connected calls that floats on your desktop. This allows users to navigate away from the application page without disconnecting their current call. This call frame will feature current call status, including the current number dialed and the ability to redial or add the last number dialed to the users contacts list with a click of the mouse.

Whew! As you can see, we have been busy over here at Jaduka Labs! Thanks for reading and if you don't already have a Jaduka Labs account, go get one right now at http://labs.jaduka.com/signup!

JADUKA NAMED 2007 W³ AWARD WINNER

JadukaTV - Gold Award Honoree

Los Angeles, CA - (October 15, 2007) - The Winners of The 2007 W³ Awards have been announced by the International Academy of the Visual Arts today. Receiving over 2,700 entries, The W³ Awards honors outstanding Websites, Web Marketing, and Web Video created by some of the best interactive agencies, designers, and creators worldwide. Please visit www.w3award.com for a complete list of W³ Award Winners.

"We were incredibly impressed by the quality and creativity of this year’s entries. W³ winners continue to raise the bar in Web development and design, push the limits of web advertising creative and pioneer the use of web video. We are thrilled to honor Jaduka with a Gold Award for 'JadukaTV,' its interactive application entry in the communications category," said Linda Day, the director of the IAVA. "On behalf of the entire Academy, we applaud Jaduka as it continues to advance Internet creativity and contribute to the burgeoning online world."

W³ Awards Info:
The W³ Awards honors creative excellence on the Web, and recognizes the creative and marketing professionals behind award winning Websites, Web video and online marketing programs. Simply put, the W³ is the first major Web competition to be accessible to the biggest agencies, the smallest firms, and everyone in between. Small firms are as likely to win as Fortune 500 companies and international agencies.

The W³ Awards is sanctioned and judged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts, an invitation-only body consisting of top-tier professionals from a "Who's Who" of acclaimed media, advertising, and marketing firms. Please visit www.iavisarts.org for a full member list and additional information. For more information about the W³ Awards, please visit www.w3award.com.

About Jaduka:
Jaduka provides Web-integrated communication tools that enable businesses to improve operational processes and better acquire and retain customers. Jaduka’s versatile, Web services API empowers developers to easily integrate voice communication into existing applications or create new solutions that access the global public switched telephone network. The company's technology lets Internet applications trigger regular telephone calls and alerts, manage voicemail, review calling history and administer account information from any phone on the planet. For more information, visit www.Jaduka.com.

By Bill Binnig, VP - Marketing

We are excited to announce the launch of our new Web site. The new site better conveys our strategic corporate direction of providing flexible and easy to use communication services and technology that results in greater customer satisfaction and increased productivity.

Furthermore, Jaduka business customers should keep an eye out for upcoming enhancements and likewise, consumers should check out the site often, as we’ve planned future product introductions that will delight users of Internet telephony services.

Current Jaduka customers can still access services and manage their accounts by going directly to the familiar storefront at http://shop.jaduka.com. In addition, a link to the “Shop” can be found in the footer menu at the bottom of each page of the new Web site. Login and account management continues to work as it always has.

By combining its unique API and services portfolio with the capabilities of NetworkIP, Jaduka is leading the development of new applications at the intersection of the world’s public switched telephone network and the Internet.

This Mother's Day send a FREE Jaduka eGreeting - The card that calls you back!

 - Great for your parents or in-laws.

 - Don't be late - Instant email delivery.

 - Eliminate expensive printed greeting cards and postage.  

 - Customize with your own photos.

Every Jaduka eGreeting has a clickable icon so the recipient can call you back instantly.

It's easy to send and it's FREE!  Click here to sign-up now!

 
RED HERRING REVEALS COMPANIES SELECTED FOR THE RED HERRING 100 NORTH AMERICA 2007

Award Recognizes the 100 “Most Promising” Companies
   Driving the Future of Technology  

San Francisco, CA, April 4, 2007— Red Herring today announced that Jaduka is a Finalist for the Red Herring 100 Award, a selection of the 100 private companies based in North America that play a leading role in innovation and technology. 

The Red Herring editorial board diligently surveyed the entrepreneurial scene throughout the North American region and identified the top 200 out of more than 800 closely evaluated companies that are leading the next wave of innovation. 

THE WEB MARKETING ASSOCIATION IS PROUD TO PRESENT THE
2007 INTERNET ADVERTISING COMPETITION AWARD

FOR OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN INTERNET ADVERTISING

Jaduka 
for
JadukaTV.com

Best Interactive Application - Telecommunications 

The Internet Advertising Competition (IAC) Awards are produced by the Web Marketing Association to honor excellence in online advertising, recognize the individuals and organizations responsible, and showcase the award winning Internet advertising. This is one of the only competitions to recognize only online categories of advertising.

Thomas Friedman predicts in The World is Flat, a Brief History of the Twenty-First Century that:

"Voice will become free.  What phone companies will compete over, and charge for, will be the add-ons.  The old voice platform did not lend itself to innovation.  But when you put voice on an Internet platform, all sorts of innovative options for collaboration become possible."

Jaduka today announced the availability of its new API that gives developers the best of both worlds.  The Jaduka API provides access to a services platform designed and built for innovation while maintaining all the benefits afforded by the standard Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). 

We've developed the API to facilitate quick and easy development of virtually limitless voice-enabled business applications that can be used with any existing telephone – wired, VoIP or wireless.   It's the services, stupid!

Jaduka recognizes that it doesn't have a corner on good ideas.  By removing barriers and providing developers with tools and direct access for the first time to the global public telecommunications infrastructure, we're inviting Web-to-voice innovators around the world to create the next generation applications.  As Friedman suggests, until today, this creativity has been constrained by bureaucratic telecom oligopolies or confined to limited IP-based private networks. 

The download is dead...  Jaduka is providing access to the network as a Web service - nothing to download and no bandwidth competition.  Developers will find it easy to program in their favorite environment - such as, Java, Perl, Visual Studio .NET or PHP – using Jaduka's common HTTP and SOAP interfaces.

Wired, VoIP or wireless - no matter how you talk, you're connected with Jaduka!

After having dug to a depth of 1000 meters last year, Scottish scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 1000 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than a millennium ago.

Not to be outdone by the Scots, in the weeks that followed, English scientists dug to a depth of 2000 meters and shortly after headlines in the UK newspapers read:

    "English archaeologists have found traces of 2000 year-old copper
    wire and have concluded that their ancestors already had an
    advanced high-tech communications network a thousand years
    earlier than the Scots."

One week later, Texas newspapers reported the following:

    "After digging as deep as 5000 meters in West
    Texas, scientists have found absolutely nothing. They have
    therefore concluded that 5000 years ago Texas inhabitants
    were already using wireless technology."

"Life is too important to be taken seriously." -- Oscar Wilde

Happy New Year!
Team Jaduka

Like some 11,000 other people, I spent the early part of last week at ad:tech New York.  Evidenced by the standing-room-only conference sessions and shoulder-to-shoulder exhibition hall aisles, interactive marketing is back.  And back it may be, but it certainly hasn’t gotten any easier for the marketer.

More companies have jumped into the fray all vying for a sliver of the advertising budget.  As you might expect at a marketing conference, vendors and presenters were all promoting their latest tools and techniques for agency or “client” customers, including:

• Pay-for-performance advertising programs
• Affiliate marketing networks/systems
• Social media/social commerce
• Viral and word-of-mouth marketing
• User-generated media/content
• Email marketing
• Emerging rich media, mobile, video, and gaming
• Performance metrics, analytics, and optimization

The Irony

Monday morning, prior to heading over to the show, I participated in Entrepreneur Magazine’s eBiz Radio Show, hosted by Chris Malta & Rob Cowie.  During the on-air interview, I described how the Internet, especially Web2.0 (including Jaduka’s products), has delivered tools that provide real value to small businesses by enabling them to effectively compete with larger organizations in ways that were previously unattainable.

After two days at the conference, with sore feet, a pounding headache and internal conflict, I kept asking myself, “How is the small business owner ever going to keep up and manage all this stuff?” 

It wasn’t until the third and final day of the show that I found some resolution.  I heard a couple speakers that put it all back in perspective for me. 

First was Kevin P. Ryan (the founder and ex-CEO of DoubleClick and now the same at ShopWiki) who said that, “marketing is less important than it used to be.”  He later clarified his message to mean that marketing needs to shift its emphasis toward the customer and the product itself and away from traditional advertising and promotion.  His take is that, with the abundance of information afforded by the Internet, markets have become economically transparent and therefore immune to traditional advertising and promotional strategies.  Thus, the only way to win is to provide greater value in terms of either price or product advantage.

The other insight I gained that rainy Wednesday morning was from David Herscott, who in his workshop titled, “Carpenters First,” reminded me to, “measure twice and cut once.”   David suggested that in this “Age of Consumer Control” marketing’s job is to clarify its message so that it provides relevancy and value to customers.  He observes that, many talk about this strategy because it is so intuitive, but that few actually practice it.  He also underscored product importance by pointing out that "you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig and today's consumers see right through the mascara."    

So, the Net-Net for small businesses is to:
a) ensure that your product or service is the very best it can be;
b) make sure that your customers can easily find your products (including information that differentiates your products); and
c) make it convenient to transact with you, including great customer service

I’ve worked for both large and small companies.  Jaduka, although owned by an established telecommunications company, definitely operates as a small start-up business.  One of the differences in working for a smaller organization is the amount and variety of work that I have to do myself.  This is euphemistically called “wearing a lot of different hats” and all things considered, I prefer it that way. 

Take, for example, the protection of intellectual property.  In a large company, if I were to create a new product or brand, I would turn to a team of lawyers and request that they file for registration of a new trademark.  At Jaduka, I go online to the United States Patent and Trademark Office website (www.uspto.gov) and file myself. 

The experience has taught me two important lessons: a) there are a lot of things that self-serving “specialists” in large organizations would have me believe are difficult which, with a little guidance, I can easily accomplish myself; and b) the Internet enables small companies to behave like big business. 

There's a certain amount of symmetry in this for me because, in much the same way, Jaduka enables small businesses to compete effectively with larger companies by empowering them the voice-enabled Web tools and technology that previously was affordable or accessible to only very large enterprises.

To file for a trademark registration for a new company name, product or brand, the USPTO website is a wealth of information.  The first step is to do a search on competing prior or existing registrations.  This is easily accomplished with the sites Boolean search function.  If the name or phrase is unclaimed, the next step is to file for registration.  Although registration is not required, it’s a good idea to provide a formal public notice of your intent to use and claim ownership of the mark. 

Interestingly, you can use the ‘TM’ or ‘SM’ for a trademark or service mark without filing for registration with the USPTO, but you may not legitimately use the ‘circle R’ without successfully completing the registration process.  Once you’ve properly filed the registration forms online, the USPTO reviews the application to determine whether the applicant meets the requirements for federal registration.  The entire process from filing to registration usually takes from nine months to over a year. 

Here’s an example of the prosecution history from one of the trademarks that I successfully registered:

2006-09-05 - Registered - Principal Register

2006-07-18 - Law Office Registration Review Completed

2006-06-30 - Assigned To LIE

2006-06-27 - Allowed for Registration - Principal Register (SOU accepted)

2006-05-31 - Statement of use processing complete

2006-05-18 - Amendment to Use filed

2006-05-18 - TEAS Statement of Use Received

2006-04-18 - Notice of allowance - mailed

2006-01-24 - Published for opposition

2006-01-04 - Notice of publication

2005-12-14 - Law Office Publication Review Completed

2005-12-14 - Assigned To LIE

2005-12-02 - Assigned To LIE

2005-11-29 - Approved for Pub - Principal Register (Initial exam)

2005-11-29 - EXAMINERS AMENDMENT E-MAILED

2005-11-29 - Examiners Amendment -Written

2005-11-29 - Previous allowance count withdrawn

2005-11-15 - Withdrawn From Pub - Og Review Query

2005-10-13 - Law Office Publication Review Completed

2005-10-07 - Assigned To LIE

2005-09-30 - Approved for Pub - Principal Register (Initial exam)

2005-09-29 - TEAS Change Of Correspondence Received

2005-09-29 - EXAMINERS AMENDMENT E-MAILED

2005-09-29 - Examiners Amendment -Written

2005-09-08 - Teas/Email Correspondence Entered

2005-08-25 - Communication received from applicant

2005-08-25 - TEAS Response to Office Action Received

2005-07-15 - Non-final action e-mailed

2005-07-15 - Non-Final Action Written

2005-07-15 - Assigned To Examiner

2004-12-22 - New Application Entered In Tram

For the past couple of days, I have been in our Austin office talking about our technology and how we make it relevant and useful.  Today, the conversation has centered around the new realities of communicating our value proposition and joining the worldwide conversation, aka "the blogosphere."

What we've realized today is that we're probably like many companies who are trying to figure out the rules of engagement.  There are no best practices.  We're all just trying to figure it out by trial and error.  So, what it comes down to for us is everything you need to know about blogging, you learned in kindergarten:

a) Share (the Blogosphere is about sharing ideas and commenting on others ideas)
b) Play fair (this is a community)
c) Be honest (never lie and be transparent about your company affiliation)
d) Be supportive of others (link and promote others)
e) Be yourself (lose the tie)

For more information check out postings from the Business Blog Summit (Lessons from the Business Blog Summit or Small Business Blogging or Searching & RSS).

Please join Jaduka at eComXpo, the world’s largest tradeshow for eCommerce Marketers. Visit our virtual booth online at www.eComXpo.com.

The online event is being held October 24-26, 2006. Registration is completely free! Keynote presentations from Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, Wired Magazine; John Battelle, Founder Web 2.0 Conference; and Steven Denton, President, LinkShare.

Learn more about Jaduka, the company that is leading the worldwide adoption of web-integrated communications. We'll be featuring Click-and-Connect, a technology that lets users trigger a regular telephone call from virtually any Internet application. Find out how you can let your website visitors or email recipients make calls instantly by simply clicking a button.

While you're there, sign up for a free Click-and-Connect account and get a button to use on your website, blog, in your email signature, or send a Jaduka eGreeting.

With Jaduka, Your Web is Calling!^SM

"See" you there!