"Excerpt From Red Herring Magazine Online"
Portal players have taken off the gloves in the wake of eBay’s announced purchase of Skype. One report on Thursday had Time Warner and Microsoft in “advanced discussions” on a merger of AOL and MSN. Another has AOL unveiling the VoIP product at next week’s Voice On the Net (VON) Coalition conference in Boston.
According to the web publication Light Reading, AOL, which was one of the first web portal companies to dabble in VoIP, is getting set to launch a full-service VoIP product that will not require AOL membership or AOL’s software client. It will be a full-blown VoIP service, much like Vonage’s, that will be available to consumers across the United States.
Also, the New York Post cites two unnamed sources that claimed Microsoft is proposing a deal in which it would pay Time Warner for a stake in AOL, after which the two companies will create a joint venture that will merge the portal efforts of AOL and MSN.
2 comments:
I think that it's interesting that Vonage had the fore sight to purchase www.vonagesucks.com. Why do you think that is?
The new service, AIM Talk Plus, which will allow for computer-to-phone calling, is slated for release in November. The current VoIP function on AIM and AIM Triton, AIM Talk, allows only for computer-to-computer calls.
AOL's announcement comes less than a month after search giant Google released a combined instant messaging and VoIP program--Google Talk. AOL's portal competitors, MSN and Yahoo!, both offer VoIP functionality similar to the current version of AIM Talk in their current messaging clients.
AOL's AIM program is the market leader in the instant messaging space, with 30.9 million visitors in July; additionally, 23 million AOL users use the proprietary service for AOL members only, according to comScore Media Metrix. MSN's Messenger trails with 23.2 million visitors in July, followed by Yahoo! Messenger, which drew 21.6 million, according to comScore.
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