FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
This may be be premature, but Om Malik seems to have a scoop on Microsoft putting the finishing touches on acquiring Teleo, a new and promising internet telephony/VOIP startup in San Francisco. I mentioned Teleo in a post this past April, sub-titled "Going, going, gone".
I was talking about the long-term impact of VOIP on the traditional telephone business, but it may also apply to Teleo as well. As Om points out, this follows on the heels of Yahoo! buying Dialpad only a few days ago.
We're on our way to telephony being folded away as just another application into the everyday services that we use. So the original intent of the sub-title applies more than ever. And all this will occur despite the new speed bumps on the road to ubiquitous VOIP like the recent FCC requirement to provide e-911 services for VOIP providers.
At the time of that announcement there was some consternation that the FCC would so blatantly pick on VOIP on e-911, while less than half of the cellphone infrastructure is ready for e-911.
With VOIP imminently being folded into portal services from Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL and others (Google?), and the continuing aggressive roll-out of services by VOIP companies like Skype and Vonage, the FCC mandate may be a blessing in disguise. By having to bite the bullet and do the harder, more expensive work of making VOIP e-911 compliant, these new voice applications will likely be all the more stronger to compete with cellular and eventually analog voice communication in the great telephony show-down to come at the KO corral.
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