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June 16, 2005
Yahoo Buys Dialpad for VoIP: What's next?
A Mercury News article today announced that Yahoo plans to buy Dialpad to expand its VoIP offerings.
Quoting from the article:
The technology of Dialpad, a 6-year-old company, will allow Yahoo to expand its VoIP offerings. Currently, Yahoo's VoIP service allows people to speak to each other only through computer-to-computer connections. In the future, the company will able to offer the nearly 62 million monthly users of Yahoo Messenger the ability to use VoIP to contact someone on a phone.``It's basically enabling us to get where we want to go faster,'' Stevens said. ``By integrating the expertise and technology that Dialpad has, we can scale more rapidly to offer PC-to-phone calling services and in-bound PC calling services so somebody can call your PC from a telephone.''
I think this is an exciting development that furthers Yahoo's move to be an integrated media and communications company.
I have been expecting developments like these ever since learning about my friend Wendell Brown's company, Teleo. I'll go out on a limb and predict that Google will make a related VoIP announcement in the next 3 months. I'm less confident but about who they will acquire, but my leading candidates would be either Skype or Teleo.
Andy Abramson, who follows the VoIP space on his blog, speculates about the next player to get acquired being a company called DeltaThree.
With all the portals moving to support voice, this might open a space of innovations in telecom. A couple examples I would like to see:
- It would be nice to just click on an IM buddy and say "call by phone", then have the relevant pc or telephones ring so you can move from typing to talking.
- Integrated voicemail with your web-based emails (e.g. yahoo mail, gmail)
- Text-to-speech for instant messages and emails (you can email or IM as text, the recipient hears it on their phone)
Posted by barney at June 16, 2005 4:56 PM
This entry was posted in the following categories: Web/Tech
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