VoIP Archives
Skype Offers Lame $1 Voucher for Outage
So everyone knows that Skype had a major outage and went through a round of public apologies and mea cuplas. I wasn’t personally affected but many were. This kind of thing reminds one that Skype isn’t a total replacement for more conventional phone service. There’s a credit voucher offer as part of the above email [...]
Google Voice on iPod Touch Gets Interesting
Much is being written about the long-awaited arrival of the Google Voice native app for the iPhone — most of it highly positive. Why might you use it on the iPhone? Hypothetically you would if you wanted to save minutes and just use data, or if you really loved the features, call transcription and notifications. [...]
Skype Making B2B Push
VoIP alternatives to traditional carriers are finally starting to gain traction in the home and in mobile. The AT&T decision to allow VoIP apps to run on its 3G network a couple of weeks ago is something of a breakthrough, although as a practical matter it’s really only about international calling at this point. If [...]
Skype & YP for Click-to-Call and SEO?
Kelsey’s Mike Boland wrote an article for Search Engine Watch, published yesterday, about how a soon-to-be-independent Skype and the YP industry might work together to drive value for both. (Skype has a local directory, SkypeFind, that isn’t very widely used.). I was going to write this post yesterday but didn’t have time. Intrigued by the [...]
Google Voice Not a Skype Killer — Yet
Early on I had a GrandCentral account but let it lapse. After the announcement of Google Voice yesterday I got back in. But it’s not exactly what I expected. There are lots of nice call management features and the SMS integration is great. I had thought however that it might be a complete substitute for [...]
What if Google Bought Earthlink?
Some time ago it occurred to me that Google might buy an ISP. It made sense to me then as a potential channel to small businesses. But now it makes even more sense from a variety of perspectives. Let’s step back for a minute. Google has recently been pushing to open up Internet access and [...]
Grokking Google and GrandCentral
Google confirmed that it had acquired telephony management platform GrandCentral today. Here’s my previous post from when the rumor surfaced. Expect integration with Google Talk and Gmail later. Perhaps this is also a full-blown challenger to IP telephony platforms such as Skype. There’s also a likely enterprise dimension to this. I’m sure Google has a [...]
Google-eBay: Post #3
I was talking to a reporter and it made me think I have to post again. There’s another aspect of this that I didn’t talk about before, which is paradoxical. Google and eBay are coming together to “accelerate” the adoption of PPCall by sharing their infrastructure and potentially distribution (my speculation). But they are requiring [...]
eBay-Google Deal: More PPCall Clarity
The WSJ and NY Times articles were a little vague on details re the implementation of the eBay and Google deal. I reached out to Google and Skype and just got off the phone with Skype. Here’s more information: The Google-eBay AdSense deal is international. Click to Call/PPCall is US only for now. This is [...]
About Greg
Greg Sterling is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence (SMI), a consulting and research firm focused on the Internet's influence on offline consumer purchase behavior.
