VentureBeat

updated
Jangl, the Internet phone company we reported about earlier this week as being in talks to sell, is essentially being closed down and its assets sold off. It is still looking for a buyer; a deal close to being signed last week has fallen through.

I just got off the phone with Michael Cerda, who was Jangl’s chief executive until he resigned on Monday. Cerda said he and his co-founder Ben Dean have joined competitor Jajah, where they will round out that company’s management team.

“We wanted to build a company here, and that’s not what is happening,” Cerda said, explaining his decision to leave to Jangl. The two founders are taking five other developers with them to Jajah. Cerda will be running business development and sales at Jajah, and Dean will help build a Silicon Valley engineering team (Jajah’s technology team so far has been based in Israel).

He said his goal is to keep the team intact, and to use its expertise to add value to what Jajah is doing and to see his team’s vision through to the next level.

He said Jangl has a skeletal crew remaining that will stay on to try to sell the company. He said there may be a strategic investor interested. Aside from its intellectual property and signed partners, Jangl still has revenue coming in, he said. It gets money from its premium calling service on dating sites and also from advertising, especially on its SMS offering.

He said the majority of Jangl’s investors wanted Jangl to proceed to a sale, even though he thought it was premature to do so. Jangl really needed 18 to 24 more months to reach its full potential, he said.

Cerda will be writing up a summary of his Jangl saga shortly, and I’ll update with a link.

Update: Here’s Cerda’ blog.

Update 2: Another VoIP company, TalkPlus, may soon be exiting the business, according to GigaOM. The company’s chief executive, Michael Toepel, recently left the company after it failed to secure a new investment. We previously covered TalkPlus last year and back in 2006 after it raised a $5.5 million first round from Menlo Ventures.

TalkPlus links your phone to local numbers in foreign countries, enabling your friends and family living abroad to drop you a line for the price of a local call.

This is a big expansion of the San Mateo, Calif. company’s previous service, which gave you the option to have multiple U.S. numbers that all dialed the same phone.

For a $9 set-up fee and a subscription ranging between $7 and $12 per month (depending on locale), your friends, family and business contacts living abroad in 30 supported countries can dial a local number that TalkPlus assigns and reach you in 192 countries throughout the world.

There are a few players, like pre-paid wireless provider TracFone and VoIP service Vonage, that offer something similar, but their reach is limited, mostly to Canada, Mexico, and the UK. The relatively unknown AIT is the closest competitor, offering local numbers in 38 countries. Their rates are higher, however, costing up to $25/month for a number in Japan.

TalkPlus is also launching a Jajah-like service with a significant innovation thrown in. When you use Jajah, you enter in your number and the number of the person you’re calling, and Jajah rings your phone. When you answer it, Jajah completes the call. This is known as call-back. The big problem with call-back is that it can’t get to you when your number has an extension, rendering it useless for huge numbers of businesses and people calling from hotels. TalkPlus solves this problem with what they describe as “call-through.”

To make a call using call-through, you take the same steps as you normally would for Jajah, except instead of having TalkPlus call you, you call a local number that it assigns, and then it connects the call. This sounds kind of arduous, but if you’re a small to medium-sized business owner using an extension-based phone system and making lots of international calls, using TalkPlus’s call-through may be one way to cut your phone costs.

The company raised $5.5 million last year (here’s our coverage) and says it’s in early talks to raise another $10 million.