Wengo was at the beginning of 2004 a subsidiary of French telecom service provider

Neuf Cegetel Neuf Cegetel was a French Wireline (networking), wireline telecommunications service provider and a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). It offered various telecommunications services to consumers, enterprises and wholesale customers, ranking ...

.techcrunch December 21st, 2006: Wengo Video Chat for Bloggers
/ref> As of February 2012, Wengo employs 80 people in the

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

headquarters, and is a subsidiary of

Vivendi Vivendi SE is a French mass media holding company headquartered in Paris. Widely known as the owner of Gameloft, Groupe Canal+, Havas, Editis, Prisma Media, Vivendi Village and Dailymotion, the company has activities in television, film, video ...

. Wengo is now repositioned as an online personal and consulting services marketplace.Wengo lève 6 millions d'euros pour développer sa place de marché de services

Voice over IP

Wengo was founded in September 2004, launching its service at the beginning of 2005 based on what is now known as the "WengoPhone, classic edition". In September 2005, Wengo opened its visiophony service at the same time as

Skype Skype () is a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, deb ...

on a cross platform (

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

and

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

). In 2006, Wengo integrated the Gaim project into its software, allowing its users to communicate via

Instant Messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...

with other users on the MSN,

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...

or Google Talk networks. Wengo and Skype started offering free PSTN calls in 2006, which accelerated the commoditization of telephony calls. In June 2006, Wengo offered a two-month unlimited calling plan to several destinations including

Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...

, Guadeloupe,

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

Martinique Martinique ( , ; gcf, label=Martinican Creole, Matinik or ; Kalinago: or ) is an island and an overseas department/region and single territorial collectivity of France. An integral part of the French Republic, Martinique is located in ...

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...

and

Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making i ...

. The offer was posted on many websites, including FatWallet, and attracted many new customers. Wengo later suspended many of these accounts, in the company's interests, after many people began abusing the unlimited calling system.

WengoPhone

Originally, Wengo was supporting the development of WengoPhone. WengoPhone was a free and open source (

GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...

)

VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet t ...

(including

video conferencing Videotelephony, also known as videoconferencing and video teleconferencing, is the two-way or multipoint reception and transmission of audio signal, audio and video signals by people in different locations for Real-time, real time communication. ...

SMS Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...

and chat) softphone through which it offered PC to

PSTN The public switched telephone network (PSTN) provides infrastructure and services for public telecommunication. The PSTN is the aggregate of the world's circuit-switched telephone networks that are operated by national, regional, or local teleph ...

phone calls. This software used the free and

open Open or OPEN may refer to: Music * Open (band), Australian pop/rock band * The Open (band), English indie rock band * ''Open'' (Blues Image album), 1969 * ''Open'' (Gotthard album), 1999 * ''Open'' (Cowboy Junkies album), 2001 * ''Open'' ( ...

SIP protocol, it was developed under the name WengoPhone by the OpenWengo project. Their

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current ...

browser extension was the first browser-based VoIP client for OS X.WengoPhone Firefox extension 0.68 Review , Macworld
/ref> The VoIP service was presented on the French market as an attempt to compete with

, Yahoo and other virtual network service providers. The economic model of this activity, however, was not sustainable. Wengo decided that WengoPhone was outside its core business, and in February 2008 transferred the project to a partner called MBDSYS — another French startup. WengoPhone and the OpenWengo community have since rebranded themselves as

QuteCom QuteCom (previously called WengoPhone) was a free-software SIP-compliant VoIP client developed by the QuteCom (previously OpenWengo) community under the GPL-2.0-or-later license. It allows users to speak to other users of SIP-compliant VoIP sof ...

Social marketplace

In June 2006, Wengo launched a social marketplace that gives its users the opportunity to create

toll-free telephone number A toll-free telephone number or freephone number is a telephone number that is billed for all arriving calls. For the calling party, a call to a toll-free number from a landline is free of charge. A toll-free number is identified by a dialing pre ...

and paying services so that they can sell their expertise over the phone. This marketplace is the core business of Wengo (no more VoIP activities).

History

;2011 :November: Wengo experts also answer paid questions (in addition to phone advice) :July: Launch of the iPhone app available on the Apple App Store (in French only) :May: The cumulative number of calls via Wengo exceeds one million calls since the beginning in 2007 (source: call counter in real time) :February: doctors are available by phone via Wengo Health. ;2010 :September: 1500 Wengo experts now have a blog available from their expert page. :June: in partnership with Acadomia, Wengo provides Online Tutoring, Acadomia Online :January: Opening to content generated by users with the launch of a forum Legal. ;2009 :Spain and opening Portugal. The sales volume for 2009 is 8 million euros according to the press release of 06/10/2004. In partnership with Universal Music, Wengo launched a music advisory service called MyMusic-Pro. ;2008 :Wengo claimed a force of 1,500 experts, including 850 experts assets generating an average income of € 500 per month. The sales volume is announced 2 million euros with 50,000 calls. In February 2008, Wengo was able to secure a significant investment of €6 million. The VoIP activity was transferred to a partner called MBDSYS. ;2007 :Launch of the new site Wengo.fr offering expert advice by phone in the categories Legal, Education, Welfare, Psychology, Business, Finance, Psychics, Leisure, Shopping, Computers. This service was launched in March 2007 by the team that created the WengoPhone. In July 2007, Neuf Cegetel's Board of Directors approved the write off of Wengo's debt for €11 million and, at the same time, agreed that investors should be able to participate in Wengo's capital by means of a reserved increase in capital that could be made by a cash contribution of €12 million. ;2006 :The software is available Wengophone and a version based on open wengo developed under the name qutecom. In December 2006, Wengo launched ''wengovisio'', a Flash-driven VoIP client that enables website owners to be called by their readers directly on their website, without any software installation.

References

External links