Thursday, December 08, 2005

Thurs - Yahoo launches VOIP telephony to rival Skype

Yahoo will challenge the world’s leading VoIP service provider, Skype, with a phone service that allows Yahoo Messenger users to make and receive calls from computers to phones for as little as $0.01 or $0.02 per minute.

The service, scheduled to be launched in the next few days according to Reuters, will include a “Phone Out” service that will allow calls from computers to phones, and a low-cost subscription service called “Phone In” for callers connecting to computer users from a phone.

It is interesting to see just how similar the portal strategies are getting to the cable companies strategies. Cable started with offering TV and films, now their offering telephony and video on demand. The portal guys started with information and messaging, now there offering telephony (VOIP) and video on demand.

Could we therefore one day see Comcast merging with Google? Or Verizon merging with Yahoo! They're now all converging on eachother at an extremely fast pace. Next year will be fascinating.

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