Slashdot Mirror
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."
Oh goody, yet another link on their homepage I can click on.
Good Business Move. Diversification of product portfolio. Nice portal, Search, VoIP, Instant Messaging.. what next?
Sony has millions of people playing their online games, just like Yahoo, you'd figure they'd see integration of VoIP into games at this point in the VoIP gold rush as a logical first step into the market.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Will I be able to get VoIP through my SBC/Yahoo! service?
The only company I have found that is interested in actually serving the customer so far is braodvoice. They will let me use Asterisk or my own equipment and let me retain control of my equipment. All the others I found refuse to. People ask me about Vonnage all the time because they advertise heavily. I always warn them away from vonnage because of the almost outright hostility I recieved from them when I was asking about using my own gear... I was accused of being a terrorist by one of their CSR's after explaining what Asterisk was and could do for me and my family and then was promptly hung up on.
If the company will not let you use your own equipment and retain control over it if you desire then I strongly suggest not using them or reccomending them to anyone.
I know that Yahoo will be the same way, Packet8 started with the same hoopla that yahoo is using right now and they also are hostile to educated users after promises of "being for the techie guy"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I can see the TV ads already: Think The Waaassuup Guys except they're yelling "Yaaaaahooo!!!". That and most of the people in the ads are white (not because Yahoo! is racist, but just because I can't see a bunch of black guys phoning each other and yelling "YAAAHOOOO!". The phrase "Yaaahoo!" is about as white as you get).
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
It's good to see VoIP starting to take off... cell phones are starting to come WiFi enabled and our wireless network transfer rates keep getting faster and able to travel longer distances. Soon (within the next 10 years or so) we won't have to pay the exhorborant fees we are currently paying to these wireless carriers (Verizon, Sprint, Cingular, T-Mobile, etc) for X amount of minutes a month. It will be interesting to see what will happen once this technology becomes popular and everyone begins making calls over the internet. I for one can't wait to do my part by helping to slashdot something with my cell phone.
www.gizmoproject.com
A open STANDARD service that is currently in beta, and runs off of the open standard of SIP.
$sig$
once the larger urban areas (read 50% of America) are able to get broadband for $20-25/month, without having to pay for a mandatory phone line or cable tv along with that, THEN VOIP will be disruptive.
But as long as the vast majority cannot get cheap broadband BY ITSELF, VOIP will languish.
Here is a theory: besides wifi, the only thing that may push down rates and packages to that mentioned above is the upcoming digital Tv switchover. Broadcasting in dgital, each tv station will be able to broadcast 3 or perhaps 6 distinct channels. Thus in many urban areas, where you might have 4 to 6 channels that most people can get via rabbit ears, that might turn into 12 to 36 channels of content. Thus, broadcast tv could compete with cable tv. Thus, cable tv will lose a lot of subscribers. Thus, they will have to sell broadband cheapers. Thus the Telcos will have to sell broadband cheaper. All the telcos will be starting up their own dsl tv.
So it may be tv that pushes broadband down, not wifi.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
This one is pretty free;
http://www.voipbuster.com/
You have to get a credit of 1 euro and you're set to go (they let you preview it for a minute if you don't have any credit).
I'm sure this is temporary, I can't see how they can keep all those countries for free for a long time.
- sigs are for wimps.
Try Here:
http://www.fwdout.net/web/
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
* Dialpad (http://www.dialpad.com/) was acquired by Yahoo! two months ago.
* Yahoo! has access numerous deals with top last-mile telecoms such as SBC in the US, BT in UK, Rogers in CA, etc.
My prediction: two months after Yahoo! starts to provide VOIP, Google will do so and then Slashdot will have an article annoucing that Google now offers VOIP and is the first one doing so and Yahoo! is copying Google.
I fail to see where the "VoIP market" is supposed to be. The software is free, you don't need any central servers for VoIP, and you are already paying someone for your Internet connectivity.
The only services you might pay for are VoIP-to-POTS gateways (to talk to those stuck in the 20th century), and directory services. The former may have a brief growth phase but then will gradually disappear. The latter can be piggy-backed on all sorts of existing free services.
In Japan, Yahoo BroadBand offers free calls to other Yahoo customers by plugging your phone into your router. The rates to call America are also staggeringly cheap (¥4/minute if memory serves). Yahoo has had this technology for a while, at least two years by my reckoning. It's good that they're going to use it elsewhere though, I guess.
The real question is- will this service work with the Asterisk PBX? They say Yahoo VoIP is based on SIP, but is it open like FreeWorldDialup or closed like Vonage?
How does copying someone else's VoIP fit in with Yahoo's business model? The way I see it, Yahoo is not in the business of person-to-person communication, it's in the business of making it easy to access knowledge of all sorts.
I can see how the IM client helps them, but software VoIP is different from IM - it's more computationally intensive, it depends heavily on the presence of broadband, and it's (in my opinion) a lot less versatile for those in a computer environment. You couldn't use this stuff in a cube environment. You can't be anonymous with voice. You can't enclose pictures or multitask easily.
For that reason it's really hard to distinguish yourself with VoIP - there's really only one thing a provider needs to do, which is get two people talking with reasonable voice quality. Once you're there, how does Yahoo! differ from anyone else?
Most importantly, how does getting people to use the Yahoo! client get people to do something that makes Yahoo! richer? Again - banner advertising won't work because people using the client aren't really looking at their computer screens.
It's hard to conceptually connect Yahoo! and any sort of VoIP client. I'm open to any suggestions of how it might work, though...
they are letting someone else do all the early market analysis and R&D. they still get to see it though, after all they are a search engine company and have the ability to stay up on all aspects of business and technology, quite easily. They are *leveraging* the ability they have (tier one level to be fair) to collect and collate mass quantities of data. They can then pick and choose the good bits that look worthwhile, and reject the rest. So therefore they get a lot of expensive free and more stable stuff by staying one step below the bleeding edge. Le$$ risky, too.
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 :)
In a sense, it sure seems like Yahoo is becoming more and more like Microsoft these days, at least in "me too" department.
Skype has had great success with it's voip offering, and now Yahoo wants in.
Apple done great with online music, and Yahoo decides maybe it can too.
Google enhances their search technologies at various stages, and Yahoo follows the lead.
And on and on.
Competition is a good thing, but it would be nice to see Yahoo come up with something completely original instead of always following along someone else's coattails. I think Yahoo is putting a little too much faith on branding and nothing at all these days on technology leadership.
If they use SIP, they'll boost the whole VoIP industry, and perhaps emerge as a leader. If they roll their own incompatible protocol, like Skype did, they'll fragment the market and industry, perhaps controlling their own island, and pay the cost later when they've got some control. But that later gambit also creates demand for a SIP/Skype/Yahoo gateway. Exactly the kind of thing that OSS apps like Asterisk are better platforms for than in-house systems. Both because the OSS winds up in different hands, with different experience, each with their own priority in making their angle work - which then can all be synthesized by the project team. And because the in-house team will give shorter shrift to competing protocol features, especially as they rush to market.
For their sake, and for the sake of not wasting 2 years fragmenting and recombining the industry, I hope they've gone with SIP. But I'm not holding my breath.
--
make install -not war
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.
Slashdot: Bogus news for nerds... Stuff that really doesn't matter.
Ain't. Gonna. Happen.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
When some people say VoIP they mean the equivalent of telephone to telephone communication (Vonage, Callvantage, Packet8 etc.) and some people mean messaging with voice (Skype, Yahoo, Messenger,iChat etc.). It's unfortunate that these two concepts have the same label. This thread is an example of the confusion that results from this glitch.
Haven't we already got free VoIP? The last thing we need is another protocol cold war. Didn't Yahoo! do enough damage with Yahoo IM?
The only way this could be a good thing is:
But of course it doesn't do that. All that will happen is that MSN will release a VoIP system, as will AIM, Apple will then piggy back on AOL service, and we'll all be left with 20 IM clients and 10 VoIP clients on our PCs wandering how we ever let it get this far out of control.
As an aside. Dear Mr. Jobs, If you are reading this, please, for the love of God/money whatever floats your boat: open up iChat. Its really, really good, but its not a killer app. No one will ever switch to a Mac for iChat. And I'll tell you why: only 3% of computers are Macs. See what happened with iTunes? That can happen again... just let windows users download iChat, for free, and watch iSights fly off shelf. Drop the price point to $50-75, let it work with USB 2, and you will have a winner. Why? Because like the iPod they are better designed, and do the job better than the competition. Logitec do not sell video calling, they sell cameras. MS/AOL sell software, but don't sell cameras. Which means that nobody is using cameras, because its too damn hard (for Joe Sixpack) to set the buggers up.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!