The new acquisitions place the search and portal company in the broader Internet calling and in the blog updater service sectors.
Milpitas-based Dialpad, a Voice over Internet Telephony provider, has been acquired by Sunnyvale-based Yahoo! Inc. The acquisition of Dialpad will allow Yahoo to expand its voice chat option within Yahoo Messenger.
Currently, users of Yahoo Messenger can place PC to PC calls only. The integration of Dialpad into the messenger service will let user make and receive calls to or from any phone.
Dialpad will discontinue its calling card offering, as well as its hardware and accessory sales. But the company’s other products like its prepaid, monthly, and US and Europe discount plans, will stay intact. The company will continue to accept new customers as well.
The acquisition will bolster Yahoo’s desire to be a true one-stop destination for its millions of subscribers. In less than a week, AOL will debut its one-stop portal service. Yahoo may have felt it needed to be able to one-up AOL’s existing voice feature in its AIM messaging client.
Also, Yahoo picked up the blo.gs syndication-pinging service. This allows users to be updated on the web and by e-mail when their favorite blogs have been updated online. Yahoo developers will develop improvements for blo.gs as well as Yahoo’s existing blog update utilities.
According to blo.gs developer Jim Winstead, “yahoo! obviously has the resources to run and improve blo.gs in pace with the incredible growth of blogs.”
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
