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EQO – Latest of the Voice/Phone 2.0 facing imminent disaster
Canadian-based EQO communications has cut back its staff from 35 to 12 employees. Is it the latest unfortunate canary in the coal mine?
EQO was/is a VoIP/social networking play offering a free application that provides free IM, cheap calling and cheap texting to your mobile phone. The problem is EQO was like about a dozen other companies on the market with the same business plan triangle of free client/cheap calls/on mobile phones, including Jangl, Jajah and TalkPlus.
EQO may have lasted longer than Jangl and TalkPlus to this point, because it managed to raise $13 million in venture capital to Jangl's $9 million and TalkPlus's $5.5 million. Jajah, on the other hand, figured out it is better to play with the big boys by providing outsourced VoIP services to the likes of Yahoo and others.
For many start-ups - VoIP and others - tightening credit markets translate to swim (make money) or die. Regrettably, many VoIP start-ups lost sight of the prime lesson out of the dot.com/dot.bomb era: Cash flow positive is not a luxury. EQO won't be the last company yielding to the ax over the next quarter.
For more:
- Techvibes reports on EQO staff cuts
- GigaOm speculates on what might happen to EQO and other VoIP startups
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Comments
Posted by Mili | February 18, 2009 - 8:20am
Yes! there are many players in VoIP market like Vopium, Truphone, Jajah etc they are working on same business model and all are working very good as Vopium launched Sync application, truphone launched IM in MWC, besides EQO there are other big players in VoIP market. EQO must bring some special features like Vopium and Truphone brings.
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