There is a scene in “Something about Mary” where a Hitchhiker describes his business plan to the Ben Stiller character. “You know 6 mins abs?, well this is better, 5 minute abs. If you walk into a store and see 6 min abs video or 5 min abs video, which would you choose?”.The humor is in the dubious value between the two and whether or not people give a hoot between the two. This is immediately came to mind when I read that Talkster(5min) was offering ad supported calls but with the same modus as Jajah. That is you type in the two phone numbers you want to connect and:
Talkster is launching a new ad-supported service at the CTIA WIRELESS IT & Entertainment 2007 cell phone convention. You just visit the Talkster website from a PC or cell phone browser and enter in your number and the number of the friend you’d like to call. After you click to get connected you listen to a ten second commercial before you can talk all you want for free.
I had written before that I thought Jajah was a glorified calling card scheme, this is just a glorified Jajah with advertising. Which probably means that next week they are going to announce $10M in funding from some overrated Sand Hill VC that thinks that everyone who doesn’t drive a Porsche and live in a $5M Palo Alto home will rent their forehead for advertising space.
