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

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

.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, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

headquarters, and is a subsidiary of

Vivendi Vivendi SE (stylized in all lowercase) is a French investment company headquartered in Paris. It currently wholly-owns Gameloft as well as a number of investments in several companies, primarily involved in content, entertainment, media, and t ...

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

on a cross platform (

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

). 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 synchronous computer-mediated communication involving the immediate ( real-time) transmission of messages between two or more parties over the Internet or another computer network. Originally involv ...

with other users on the

MSN MSN is a web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps provided by Microsoft. The main webpage provides news, weather, sports, finance and other content curated from hundreds of different sources that Microsoft has partnere ...

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

Google Talk Google Talk was an instant messaging service that provided both text and voice communication. The instant messaging service was variously referred to colloquially as Gchat, Gtalk, or Gmessage among its users. Google Talk was also the name o ...

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, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...

Guadeloupe Guadeloupe is an Overseas departments and regions of France, overseas department and region of France in the Caribbean. It consists of six inhabited islands—Basse-Terre Island, Basse-Terre, Grande-Terre, Guadeloupe, Grande-Terre, Marie-Galant ...

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

Martinique Martinique ( ; or ; Kalinago language, Kalinago: or ) is an island in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies, in the eastern Caribbean Sea. It was previously known as Iguanacaera which translates to iguana island in Carib language, Kariʼn ...

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...

and

Vietnam Vietnam, officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), is a country at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of about and a population of over 100 million, making it the world's List of countries and depende ...

. The offer was posted on many websites, including

FatWallet FatWallet was a comparison shopping website, centering on a set of forums that allowed users to publish deals and rebate offers on products and services, with computer-related products and electronics most prominent in the listings. It was headqu ...

, 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 Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

(

GPL The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first c ...

)

VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also known as IP telephony, is a set of technologies used primarily for voice communication sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. VoIP enables voice calls to be transmitted as ...

SMS Short Message 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 phones exchange short text messages, t ...

and

chat Chat or chats may refer to: Communication * Conversation, particularly casual * Online chat, text message communication over the Internet in real-time * Synchronous conferencing, a formal term for online chat * SMS chat, a form of text messagi ...

) softphone through which it offered PC to

PSTN The public switched telephone network (PSTN) is the aggregate of the world's telephone networks that are operated by national, regional, or local telephony operators. It provides infrastructure and services for public telephony. The PSTN consists ...

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'' (Gerd Dudek, Buschi Niebergall, and Edward Vesala album), 1979 * ''Open'' (Go ...

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 curr ...

browser extension A browser extension is a software module for customizing a web browser. Browsers typically allow users to install a variety of extensions, including user interface modifications, cookie management, ad blocking, and the custom scripting and st ...

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 is free of charge, unless air-charges apply for mobile telephone service. A toll-free ...

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