If you didn’t already know, the Internet Telephony market is booming. I’m sure many of you’ve seen the Vonage commercial with that crazy guy dancing in the background.

Well, today Lycos, yes, Lycos, and a start up company, Jajah (which you can try for free at Jajah.com), which has received money from a large Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital. Jajah only recently launched it’s U.S. service.

In my opinion, there are already too many companies involved- Skype… AOL… Google… Microsoft… Earthline… Yahoo… and more.

But, Lycos, a newcomer, is offering the best deal- less than 1 cent a minute from P.C. to Phone calls. It also offers a free US phone number (compare that to Skype, charging about $38USD a year) and some other features that you generally find with your landline provider. Honestly, I think that even though Skype is the current leader in this growing market, Lycos’ll soon give Skype a run for it’s money. I have signed up with Lycos, and am awaiting my email with my real US phone number. When I get the number, I’ll post on our forums.

Now, this is the thing that I love the best. If you’re on a tight budget (or not…) and won’t/can’t spend more for something that you’re already paying for, or maybe this number is for your e-business or website and you don’t want to pour money into it, this is the best option for you. With Lycos, there is a page where you can sign in to get free minutes. How to do it is simple:

Just choose which denomination of minutes you want (the choices are $1, $2, $5, $10, $15, and $20), and see the offers. I personally like the lower denominations because they require less info (I wouldn’t trust these sites for a second with my credit card info- no matter how hard they try to insist that they won’t charge it). Just fill out the forms, check for any confirmation emails, and within some time you should get that much money put into your account. Know that $1 goes extremely far in this case- calls to most places are under $0.01 a minute.

I would suggest, though, creating a new email address specially for this, because these sites send lots of spam. Unless you like spam, DO NOT use your main email address. Preferably, use Gmail, because space is added every second (there’s a ticker on the home page). Now, you don’t have to use invites anymore- they’ve opened it to the public.

This is a pretty long review, but I thank you for reading it.