Jaduka Doesn’t Monetize Widgets
Jaduka is a company that hasn’t been on my radar, but should have been.
Telephony widgets are no big deal. Many companies have announced those. Many have given them away. Jaduka is no exception. Unlike may of these other companies, which generally are working out some way to monetize these widgets, Jaduka has no plans to try and monetize them.
Jaduka’s real play is the API and hosting both transaction and telephony-based services–where some serious coin can be made. These guys have not only the experience to do it, but the platform and relationships to back it up.
Jaduka’s parent company, NetworkIP, provides services to the prepaid voice calling industry. All those little prepaid phone cards you buy in grocery stores here in the U.S. and have activated at the register? NetworkIP is likely operating the platform behind it, with over 400 million active accounts and 2 million transactions daily. They run carrier-grade, five-nines reliability network and connect with over 120 different carriers, including leading tier-one carriers.
Why do the widgets at all? According to Trevor Baca, Vice President of Software Engineering at Jaduka, it’s a demonstration of the power of their telephony API and their backend services. From my point of view, it’s a marketing expense as it makes people aware of Jaduka, but it also provides their platform some “real world” exposure.
Clearly, these guys already have massive scale and have an established revenue and business model. Extending their prepaid calling card platform to do other transaction-based services should be fairly trivial, and bring in even more revenue. Sounds like a winning strategy to me!
