A three-day Skype outage in August this year and the acquisition of Skype by eBay is now an acknowledged failure, however this doesn’t stop the growth of its users. Maybe the Skype users are not really bother about those stuff other than using it. Today marks another milestone for Skype, they had grown to more than 10 million users that running this software online. And this number is expected to increase everyday. Interestingly, the growth of Skype’s users does not commensurate with its financial performance, albeit that Skype, owned by eBay trying to improve it materially for the past two years.

Sipera, a company that provides product and solution on VOIP security has raised $10 million in a round C financing from venture capitalists (VC) Duchossois Technology Partners, alongside with existing investors Austin Ventures, Sequoia Capital and STAR Ventures. According to their press release, this round of financing brings Sipera a total amount of VC funds to $29.5 million. Sipera will use most of this fund toward expansion in sales and support, technology improvement and etc. VOIP security market, which did not accepted favorably five years ago, is now a hot business opportunity due to the rising popularity of VOIP services nowadays. As suggested by several market research reports that I came across, VOIP services is expected to achieve a phenomenal growth over the next few years and the market size is estimated approx. $6 billion by 2010. Maybe the fact of the breathtaking pace of all these VOIP vendors, most of the vendors in this field have caught the eyes of the VC. Rebtel snagged $20 million in September last year, Truphone raised $24.5 million in January, and Jajah got $20 million in a round C financing (PDF) also in this year, just to name a few. It is significant that a VOIP security vendor Sipera has been able to raised nearly $30 million funding since its first inception in the market less than 3 years, albeit that I still can’t figure out how much is their actual sales revenue.

Sipera is founded in year 2005, with headquartered in Richardson, Texas, and a development center in Hyderabad of India. One of its key products, i.e. Sipera IPCS 310 has won the 2006 Innovation Award winner from an Technology Marketing Corporation’s TMC Labs division.

Jangl, a company that I covered in April last month, released a new beta service today. This is a new service that allowed Jangl users to call anyone online at anytime without their phone number, by simply input an email address on the Jangl’s landing page in order to get connected. As usual, Jangl is very strict in protect and secure the phone number of their users. Though this beta services will be started off today and available in 31 countries, some technical items were occurred. According to the blog of the CEO of Jangl, Canada hasn’t worked well all day since this is the first day the service has launched in the market, and the registered users need to sign up again, thus Jangl has their valid email addresses, and etc. However, for this moment, the quality of this end product and the novel idea that use email address to bypass the global phone charges has represented the further endorsement of their progress to date.

Meanwhile, the above mentioned services is free during the beta period and there is no news currently pertaining to the future cost of this feature that need to be bore by the users, and hence I still do not know what will be their long-run business model. But my sense is that it will be positioned as a commercially successful product as well as a source of competitive advantage for them in the future.

Jangl has released the public beta last year but it seems that it found the direction in secured partnerships for its unique VOIP services. To use Jangl, a user must register to get an unique Jangl ID or a special Jangl widget with the Jangl phone number, i.e. ten-digit number and his/her friends can use their own Jangl phone numbers to call this user or vice versa. The actual phone number, be it the landline or cell phone is safe. The Jangl phone number is a special number that provided by Jangl. In other words, Jangl is the VOIP provider for this type of free phone calling services available for the U.S. consumers.

Jangl seems to building the necessary products for the social network industry. In fact, social networking is a huge market that should not be overlooked by any player in the market. You’ll come across a newly launched social networking site in every week inevitably. They have partnered with Match.com by offering a matchTalk services for the Match.com’s members in November last year. I tend to believe that Jangl is making the necessary products with the exceptional quality for the use of social network, by this logic, they will achieve the success they need eventually. They’re now allowing their Jangl’s widget to post on the member profiles of Tagged and hence, this widget will automatically generates a private phone number enabling user to connect with their Tagged friends over any phone, without exchanging their true phone number, according to the latest news of Jangl.

This move helped Jangl to provide their VOIP phone services to the members of Tagged, currently amounted to 40 million people. However, I’m quite skeptical about this type of service. If you’re an existing Tagged user, will you pick up a phone call when you really do not know the caller, albeit that your Jangl phone number suppose to be privately owned by your friends? How many percent of the existing Tagged users will post the Jangl’s widget onto their personal profiles remain a big question now? Will you say: “Oh! What the heck!” Meanwhile, I know social network supposedly to be opened, but to what extent this type of network should be opened?