Yahoo, voIP, and NTOP
Yahoo beefs up Net phone features
Last modified: June 22, 2004, 8:18 AM PDT
By Ben Charny
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
CHICAGO--Has Yahoo found its voice?
The maker of one of the world's three most popular consumer instant-messaging applications has spiced up the software's telephone capabilities, adding "click to call," a feature that lets a subscriber click on an icon to make a phone call, and "find you/follow me," which allows people to specify which of their phones will receive incoming calls.
The features will be available for use after telephone companies buy and incorporate the software. The offering will be marketed to U.S. carriers, who would then offer it as a service to their subscribers, said David Illing, senior vice president at Sylantro, the software company that built the infrastructure for the new capabilities. Subscribers to Yahoo Messenger will then be able to use the new features when calling people who have telephone service through a participating carrier.
Two possible customers are SBC Communications and Verizon Communications, which already use Sylantro voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) software, although no deals have been signed yet. The new, souped-up Yahoo software is being demonstrated for the first time at Supercomm 2004, a telephone industry trade show taking place here this week.
Yahoo's unveiling of the new features comes just a few days after it confirmed it had scrapped its premium instant-messaging service, but the company did not indicate that there's any correlation between the two events.
The Sylantro-Yahoo effort is turning heads because it represents renewed interest by Yahoo in using VoIP, which digitizes calls and sends them over the Net. VoIP is cheaper than landline services because it avoids the heavily regulated and taxed traditional phone networks.
But ever since Yahoo launched Net phone capabilities in the mid-1990s, the company's done little to promote or improve the technology. There is a healthy amount of free calling among users of Yahoo Messenger, which allows any two subscribers to plug headphones into their computers and talk for free. But the company has yet to see significant traffic among plans that charge subscribers on a per-minute basis, a source said. The premium service lets IM subscribers call phones, as well as other computers.
The new interest in voice capabilities could be "just what this industry needs," because of the presence of Yahoo Messenger on 40 million computer desktops, making it by far the largest installed base in the Net phone industry, Illing said. Plus, it may draw competitive responses from two of Yahoo's major IM rivals: Microsoft and America Online.
"The goal here is to drive mass adoption," Illing said.
An America Online representative said the company is "looking at everything," in terms of upgrading its instant-messaging software, but for now the company is not planning any voice upgrades like Yahoo's. A Microsoft representative could not be immediately reached for comment.
But other Net phone insiders aren't so optimistic. Especially in the United States, the natural instinct when making a phone call is to reach for a phone, not a computer, said Sarah Hofstetter, senior vice president of Net2Phone, a cable telephony provider. Once technology to make Net calls from regular phones became affordable, adoption of the technology took place, she said.
"That's really why VoIP evolved beyond the desktop," she said. |
