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Yahoo Readies New VoIP Service
Rob writes "Yahoo is readying to capture a larger piece of the VoIP market and will announce a
new VoIP product during the next two weeks. The new service would be comparable to
Skype Technologies SA's, said Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Wall Street
researcher Piper Jaffray Co, which makes a market in Yahoo stock. The impending move by
Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo into the VoIP
arena would potentially be disruptive."
There are several services that allow free inbound calls from pstn - but require you to pay for outbound.
sipgate.co.uk - free inbound UK and German numbers
stanaphone.com - free inbound NYC and Area
messagenet.it - free inbound italy number
I have one asterisk PBX here in Toronto with inbound phone numbers in all of the above - I don't pay for a single one of the inbound numbers (I pay for local service thru Vonage).
This site has a lot of useful information on SIP providers and Asterisk http://www.voip-info.org
Broadvoice does kick ass.
I use unlimited world plus and it's the best thing ever. Infact, in this country (japan) the telco charges per-minute for their own VOIP, so by using $25/month unlimited world plus I can get *flat rate* calls to all over japan, where if I used jap voip they would charge something like 10c/3minutes. Thank god for american companies who don't have their heads firmly planted in their asses unlike the japanese telco.
This may just be my perception of things, but:
Yahoo's strategy of late seems to be to look around for new areas where some new or expanding company has found an up and coming IT market, and then drop in beside them with a me-too product.
While I guess it's good they're investing into growth markets or what not, doesn't this really kind of seem like a not-great plan in the long run? Because it seems to me like there's a problem here in that this strategy seems to bank on jumping into the market only after someone else has demonstrated how to make the market work and provided a template for Yahoo to run their business on. Or in other words, it means that Yahoo will always be entering the market after it becomes relatively stable and the bulk of the customers are already set up and satisfied with a first choice of providers. It seems like Yahoo is gunning to set themselves up as the second place contender in every single market out there...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Not totally free, but www.voipbuster.com allows you to make calls to many countries (some landlines, some mobile, some both) for free... once you put at least 1 Euro into an account. I've used it for about an hour so far - it's definitely not worse than POTS. In some respects, its better - really easy to dial, good sound quality with no huge lag or choppyness. However, the software is still pretty basic, only for Windows, and the lag is about the same from your house to your neighbors as it is from your house to some country halfway around the world (should not be the case, but it seems to happen anyways). So the bottom line: not completely free, but O(1) cost is asymptotically better than O(n) cost :)
Yahoo Shoots Down VoIP Speculation
By Jim Wagner
Officials at Internet portal giant Yahoo (Quote, Chart) are denying a report that it will launch a VoIP (define) service in the next two weeks.
In a research report issued this week, Safa Rashtchy, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, said the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company was likely to launch a service similar to the popular Skype application.
The analyst noted that such a service would "expand Yahoo's content footprint and further establish Yahoo's brand as a comprehensive provider of content, search and communication services," and likely run as both an advertising-based basic service and paid premium service.
That's not the case, Yahoo officials said.
"The rumor from the financial analyst is not true," Terrell Karlsten, a Yahoo spokeswoman, told internetnews.com.
Yahoo has been making a number of moves this year to advance its voice offerings. That's sparked speculation over the company's VoIP strategy.
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Dear Slashdot, For the thousandth time: www.yahoo.com is NOT INTENDED FOR YOU. Please instead use search.yahoo.com. You will find it more soothing. Smooches, Your friends at Yahoo.