Revamped Lycos offers free mobile calls

Lycos is offering free mobile-to-mobile calls to anywhere in the Europe, the US or Canada to encourage people to try out its new communications services, which have been rebranded Jubii.

Calls, which are limited on the free service to five minutes and a total of half an hour a day, use a similar system to that of web telephony company Jajah. You go to the Jubii (pronounced you-bee) portal and type in your number that that of the person you are calling; the system then calls each number from local gateways and connects the two.

Jajah calls from a landline to a landline or mobile are free in many countries, so long as both parties are signed up; otherwise you get cut-rate charges; calls initiated from a mobile tend to be more expensive.

The Jubii offer on mobile calls requires only the caller to have signed up. It will offer similar cut-price deals to Jajah on paid-for calls. The offer is part of a major revamp of the Lycos email, dating, chat and social networking services which have been brought together under the Jubii portal.

The UK site goes live officially tomorrow (May 4). You can sign up today but the rest of the site does not appear to be working. Early sign-ups are being given 10Gbytes of online storage; the standard offering will be 4Gbytes though you can pay for more.

Features of the new Jubii portal include instant messaging based on open-source G-mail compatible Jabber, intelligent message filtering, email, chat and telephony, online storage, and interactive file sharing.

It is all browser based but allows you to use desktop features such as drag-and-drop. You can, for instance, drag tags on to emails to allow sorting by category, a system Jubii favours over folders.

Jan Wergin, Jubii executive vice president, said :"These are not traditional web services. This is software acting within a browser. You won't need to download anyting."

Lycos's six million exisiting email users will be moved over to the new service when  it goes live.