So, as you have seen in previous posts – here and here.

I was convinced to re-think my stance on my initial review of JaJah.com – on online / offline voice over IP telephony provider. So after much time, quite a few phone calls, and even some emails to JaJah support – I have come to the conclusion that I am now going to revise my original review to a new status.

I can now only strongly recommend that this service is not something you should even try.

To briefly sum things up – after Frederik Hermann’s email I tried the service again. It went offline for a long period of time without any sort of notice on the site. I then sent several emails to the support team – and have yet to have a response (not even an automatic one), and I have even sent emails to Mr Hermann directly. To make it clear – my problems with JaJah are as follows :

• Customer Service
  • Support does not answer questions
  • There is no real "self support" on the site
• Call Quality
  • Between Australia and Japan it is exceptionally poor
• Usability
  • There are no error messages in the web interface when the site is down and you can not place a call
  • Recorded messages when placing a call are not in English (and no interface to select what language you want).
  • The "mini" interface didn’t work with any of the cell phones I tried (I am on contract to one of the worlds largest cell phone companies – I tried a lot).
  • For non computer literate people (the apparent target of JaJah.com) the many problems and inconsistencies with the site would just be too much

It is really disappointing to me because the concept here is awesome, but the execution is just so incredibly poor – I fear that if people try this – and get turned off the idea – they will be reticent to go back and try it again – even if it is another company.

So now Google Video users can send links to a video at anypoint in the playback timeline. This is a kind of cool and is mentioned in a heap of articles already – including this one on ZDNet.
To use it you just append the time you want to the end of your video url… so if you were linking to Paris Hilton’s new music video – and you just wanted to see the last 30 seconds – your link would go from this:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5615212328010933613
to this
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5615212328010933613#4m0s
There is more information on the official Google Video Blog.
[UPDATE: I know the last 30 seconds of the Paris Hilton video above is just blank - try and understand they way my mind works.]

Well – it would appear that I might be wrong. The fine art of customer service could still be alive. I recently posted about my experiences with JaJah.com – a company that I was very very excited about.
I think the concept that the JaJah team has come up with is excellent. Giving the non computer savvy an opportunity to use technology to help reduce their telecommunications cost what it should is a noble effort, and I wish every success to JaJah in doing this.
Unfortunately – my feelings for the JaJah concept may not have been clear in my previous post. After my comments last week, I was contacted by Frederik Hermann, the Online Marketing Manager for JaJah.com and whilst I still have some concerns I have decided to try again.
As I have finally had the money that I transferred across early last week appear in my Money Bookers account, I have now added some credit to my account with JaJah, and I look forward to giving it a go again.
When time permits I will make a few more calls between Japan and Australia and let you know what the result is.
Mr Hermann pointed out that the service is normally post-paid – and he was not sure why I was on a pre-paid account, and that they are still working with their partners to provide the best possible voice quality. He further went on to state that as he was aware Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, Israel and the
United States all had excellent call quality – and he encouraged feedback to their support team if I was still having issues elsewhere.

[UPDATE] Please also read my more recent post on JaJah – here

JaJah.com has recently been getting a lot of press coverage about how they are taking on the big boys and all those things coroprate / financial journo’s like to write about startups. But – I haven’t seen any reviews of their service. This could be because (at the moment) their voice service is crap, and so is the customer service.

Now, I hope you made it past that first paragraph – I know it is a little negative and all – but I don’t know how else to clearly make my point. I saw JaJah mentioned on a geek news thing earlier this week, so I thought I would give it a spin.

I signed up – which was painless enough, entered all my details and tried to make a call. The site kept putting a message on the bottom that I had to put my account into credit before I could make a call. So, off I went to the payments page – where I was told that to pay by credit card – I had to have my account in debit of more then one Euro. Confused, I went to try and make a call again. Then I logged out, logged in again, checked my email for some more info – nothing.

It seems that they don’t actually have a credit card payment engine that works for “normal” people yet. So, I thought I would make a payment with one of their other allowed methods. I know I just finished talking about PayPal before – and honestly, I am not a fan boy – but it really is one of the biggest payment solutions online. Why would somebody (JaJah.com for example) choose to go with three unknown and VERY difficult to use payment providers and not support PayPal?

I gave in and tried to create an account with one that supported linking to Australian bank accounts – because none of them support credit cards properly. It said it would take 2 – 5 days, 5 days later – I am still waiting.

In the interum – I thought I would signup for a Business Account (includes facilities like putting a “call me” button on your website etc) to give that a go on the Purple Oranges site. I sent the form off using the JaJah site and the following day received an email asking for among other things a copy of a utility bill in my company name to be sent via fax only to them.

I may be being difficult – but I don’t want a line of credit – I just want to use their services – why do they need to see a utility bill. I replied to their email with a request for them to let me know when they have properly established signup and payment systems, and until then I wished them luck.

Lastly – call quality.

I have tried a few calls using their service (JaJah to JaJah user calls are free at the moment). As those of you who know me are aware – I am very into VoIP. I know that currently there are several failings with internet based telephony, one of them being latency of the call. JaJah calls make my 100 – 200ms latent calls sound great. On every call I experienced latency of approximatly 600ms to 2 seconds. As you can guess – it was impossible to have a conversation. I know that NASA is good at this sort of thing, but there is no way the people that JaJah are obviously targetting are going to put up with that.

I am assuming that JaJah is targetted at Mum and Dad type non-computer savy users, who want to save a buck on their calls – but don’t want to use their computer to do it. In my experience though – these people are not going to put up with the kind of road blocks JaJah throws in the way – for the moment at least.

[Further Update - 21 July] It was too good to be true! Shentech has turned out to be one of the dodgiest companies I have ever dealt with. I should have read their reviews on froogle. But, as it turned out I didn’t – and so far I am in the process of getting burnt to the tune of over $AUD400. I have had to lodge a case with PayPal in an effort to get my money returned. Let me state this as clearly as I can – my personal recommendation is do not use shentech!
[UPDATE] I finally managed to order online with a company called shentech. It was one of the best shopping experiences I have had! I added the product to my cart, asked for the checkout – was taken to a yahoo orders page, selected PayPal – picked my bank account and I was done! I would like to thank Froogle for finding it for me!

More and more I am finding that people are comfortable shopping online, which is great – but I still think that online retailers (especially the big ones) have a long way to go until the internet is truly an online market place.

I have been trying to purchase a DVD player, a simple enough task you would assume – but I have a couple of problems. Firstly – I am living in Japan and I dont speak Japanese. The issue here is that I am yet to find a shop that sells a DVD player (or any other electronic device for that matter) that has english language menus / remote. I would even settle for a multi-lingual unit that I can switch to english – but I cant even find one of them.

Because of my language issue, I decided to shop online. Get a unit shipped to me from the States or Europe – and I will be fine. An easy enough task!… or not.

I decided on a Buffalo CD/DVD player. Yes, I know it isnt a sony - but – it also playes videos etc off the network. Something which I need over here as there is no English FTA television.

The Buffalo site refers me to a price guide – with linkgs to all the major online retailers. Nievely – I get excited thinking I may have this before the weeks end. How wrong could I be!

I started my trek on Tuesday afternoon. I picked the cheapest online retailer, and went to purchase. I found that their order form only had American states and territories listed, but had a link on the bottom for “international purchases”. What was even better was that they supported PayPal – which is good because it is linked to my Australian bank account. So I fill in the “International” order form – and wait to get to a payment screen.

The next screen thanked me for my order, and then told me that I would receive an email with payment details. I had only three days to make the payment to secure the order, so I should act immediatly. And that I did. Opening my email – I saw the order acceptance and started reading. I skimmed it first – looking for a URL link to a PayPal payment page or something – nothing. So I read it again, carefully this time. Only information on wire transfers. I was getting a little frustrated and confused… I couldn’t (and still can’t) understand why a site would accept PayPal for American orders – but wire transfers only for international.

I shot off an email to their payment support address, and got a response overnight. The respondant informed me that wire transfer was the only accepted method of payment – and re-issued me with the details for wire transfers. I wrote a return email. Let’s just say it is clear that I don’t want to deal with that supplier.

I will save you the pain of reading my next four online shopping experiences, each one progressivly more expensive then the previous. And each – with no automated international ordering system. All of them having to be manually processed, and most not accepting online payment methods.

I am now onto my fifth online retailer, and I am awaiting a confirmation email about shipping costs and a link to a paypal payment site. Their online store confirms delivery to Japan is available and that they accept paypal for international transactions… I will let you know.

Well, I have managed to get myself used to (and reliant upon) the Tokyo public transport system. It is a very comprehensive network of underground and above ground trains and busses. You really can get almost anywhere – quite easily and in very reasonable time.

In the last few days however something has been going wrong. The buses, trains and everything else in Tokyo seem to run exactly on time – until yesterday – the latest a bus has been is about 30 seconds past it’s time on the board. But since yesterday – my morning bus has been 15 minutes late – and because of this – absolutly packed.

I think this may have been caused by “accidents” on the train system (accident is the japanese word for suicide it seems). When there is an “accident” I think busses take over – but I can’t really tell.

Anyway – this is less a rant and more just a concern

Image002,
originally uploaded by zi0nschild.

This is my desk – exciting isn’t it

They have everything here,
originally uploaded by zi0nschild.

reads “The Kitchen”, “Foods and Drugs”.

Sounds interesting.