Yoomba is good; too good, perhaps
You’ve got to admit it’s a compelling promise: Phone calls through your email address.
The interesting idea comes from start-up Yoomba, a company jointly headquartered in Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley, and the company is (perhaps) audaciously billing itself as “the world’s first peer-to-peer open communications experience.”
The Yoomba blog is equally as ecstatic: “We understood [that] we need to create something from scratch - a new open experience. This experience should look, act, and feel like something you already know. So we created the Yoomba experience!”
Yoomba has reportedly developed technology which “turns any email address into a phone or instant messenger.” This means, essentially, that phone calls could become free. In theory. The technology that has the blogosphere abuzz is an open peer-to-peer application that “sits on top of every email network,” thereby turning any email address into a phone or messenger.
Yoomba promises to integrates into email applications, adding buttons next to contact details in all of the major webmail programs, Outlook and Outlook Express. Said buttons provide one-click access to contacts using voice or instant messaging.
The strangely-named co-founder/CEO of the strangely-named company, Elad Hemar, declared that “Yoomba has created email calling and email chat in the simplest way possible,” claiming that “At Yoomba we are changing the way people communicate by providing the first open p2p network, putting consumers back in control.”
(Though this snarky My VoIP Newswriter could ask, “‘Back in control?’ When have consumers ever had control over telecom services?”)
You can activate an account at the Yoomba homepage; before you too, however, you may want to take a look at a handful of cautionary tales reported on a piece over at Network World by Cara Garretson; the title self-explanatorily declares “Early Yoomba users say the service spams contact lists” and is a bit of a downer for something that kind of sounded too good to be true.
(Of course, you know what they say about things that sound too good to be true.)
Some grievances – aptly demonstrating the 21st-century infatuation with the exclamation point, incidentally – posted at Network World and collected from other sources go like this:
• “It spammed my entire contact list…. I call that a virus.”
• “…not in fact my closest friends ‘on’ Yoomba, but rather my entire contact list, [Yoomba] proceeded to spam. How embarrassing. Needless to say, I uninstalled.”
• “These guys put in this cute little feature where after install, it brings up a screen to add contacts. If you don’t read carefully (or maybe even if you do ... I can’t seem to get back to the screen) it spams all of your freaking contacts!!!”
Wellllll, My VoIP News is willing to give Yoomba the benefit of the doubt for the time being; perhaps this is just a security issue…? Or maybe i’m just salivating at the possibility of free phone calls with a hard technology upgrade…If any users have comments, please send them to My VoIP News before i “embarrass” myself with spamming. This thing really sounds too good to be true!!!!
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