Yahoo has new services on tap with major traditional phone carriers that will blend its IP technology with the public switched telephone network.
The company has services in the offing with British Telecom and SBC that employ the unique technologies of Yahoo and the PSTN, Brad Garlinghouse, vice president of communication products for Yahoo, told Fall VoN 2005.
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Garlinghouse says customers can look forward to intelligent presence – intelligence in the network that can decide where to try to reach a customer. Rather than a person being accessible or not accessible, network intelligence could check customers’ calendars, and if the network finds they are in a meeting away from any landline, ring their cell phones, he says.
Service elements could combine resources of more than one provider, he says. For instance, Yahoo plans next year to team with SBC to present SBC voice-mail as audio attachments to Yahoo e-mail.
Similarly, using British Telecom’s softphone, called Communicator, customers could see the identification of who is calling on the screen of a PC or smartphone, then have the option to route the call to another phone or voice mail, for example.
Soon to come are voice-triggered applications such as Yahoo Search. It would seek terms as spoken, so customers can perform hands-free Web searches and search from phones without having to use tedious keystrokes, Garlinghouse says.
This last possibility requires an open VoIP platform, something that doesn’t exist today between all carriers, he notes, so initially such services would have to be arranged carrier by carrier, he says.
But customers won’t buy VoIP services unless they make their lives simpler, not more complex. People buy cell phone service for the mobility, but would welcome one voice mailbox that handles both their cell and landline messages, he says. That type of simplicity cannot be reached without standardized VoIP platforms, Garlinghouse says.
People would also buy a seamless address book if they could get one, he asserts. When a customer changes a person’s phone number in their cell phone address book, a seamless address book would change the number as well in their contact list by integrating with their contact data store, he says.
This data in the network also serves another big draw for customers, mobility, he says, meaning customers can reach information they want via phone, PC, PDA – whatever connectivity they have.
