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Technology Stocks : IDT *(idtc) following this new issue?* -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: vinh pham who wrote (7362)	5/6/1999 2:27:00 PM
From: Secret_Agent_Man	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 30916

Netscape Communications Corp. (www.netscape.com) also is contributing to widespread seeding of the chat voice capability by including IDT Corp.'s (www.idt.net) Net2Phone (www.net2phone.com) client software in version 5.0 of the Netscape Communicator browser. IDT at press time was preparing to make Net2Phone a more chat-friendly option by including software that allows someone in a chat session to be called by another session participant without letting the caller know the called party's phone number. "Once this technology achieves a presence on everyone's desktop, you're going to see it used in a much more immediate, spontaneous way than before," says David Greenblatt, chief operating officer at Net2Phone. "It's really at the breakout point." The new privacy feature in Net2Phone is made possible through a new software component in the gatekeeper directory management system. The called individual simply inputs a "handle" that the caller can use, and that name is registered along with the phone number in the Net2Phone directory system so that when the caller types in the name, the system automatically rings the phone. Such anonymity will help make voice connections more useful in "girl/boy" chat situations or in e-commerce applications in which a party with an inquiry online wants a callback without having to divulge his or her phone number, Greenblatt notes. IDT would like to build on its Netscape affiliation with a closer link to AOL and its chat support system, which it acquired last year with its purchase of ICQ Inc. (www.icq.com), the leading provider of chat registration facilities, Greenblatt says. IDT also is talking to @Home Network, he adds. In all cases, even though such big service providers have their own backbones, they need the gateways and other telephony components that IDT can provide. "We have the network to rate and route these calls," Greenblatt says. "You need a big back-end infrastructure for this to work on a mass scale, with a heavy base of servers distributing the load," he says. And you need a standardized approach like H.323, he adds. Dym has no argument with that. With voice over chat set to explode, Tribal Voice is about to move from the proprietary IP voice system it has been using as supplied by VocalTec Communications Ltd. (www.vocaltec.com) to an H.323-based system. "We want to make it as easy as possible for people to interact with each other by voice," Dym says. soundingboardmag.com