Net business and community poised for growth

Net business and community poised for growth
After the recent acquisition of Skype Technologies by eBay, there seems enough happening in the internet telephony market to indicate that Skype's top slot is threatened with the entry of several big names like Google, Yahoo! and TelTel, who promise to arrive with competitive VoIP services.

Last month, it was Sony who offered a free Voice over IP service, replete with video calling. In October, AOL launched a PC-to-phone service and prior to that, in August, Google had given the market its PC-to-PC instant-messaging program called Google Talk, which is also call-enabled. Yahoo has graduated from PC-to-PC calling to two new subscription based Web telephony programs.

These two services will enable customers to make voice based calls from a computer to a telephone and vice versa. The new dual VoIP services are called Phone Out and Phone In, and are part of Yahoo Messenger along with Voice.

If eBay's Skype launched PC-to-PC video calling last week, now Yahoo also has PC-to-PC video calling.

Experts forecast that in 2006, the Net industry will be concentrating on gathering more loyal customers. The reigning rule of the game seems to be, “the more the better”. Keeping the web community hooked online with an increasing bandwidth of services is the key to pouring revenues, according to analysts.

Google has been the leader in terms of soaring share prices in 2005. Its popularity has ensured online business to secure maximum gains from advertising there and reaching out to millions of requisite customers. Yahoo and Amazon followed a good second and third in the stock market. However, EBay had a tough time sliding down the stock market graph, the main reason being that it lost its exclusivity as a singular place to be at for online deals, what with so many players entering the foray. Due to search engines, shopping could be done anywhere. Nearly 40% of shoppers began their purchases at Google, 21% at Yahoo and only 23% at eBay, as per a holiday survey.

EBay purchased Skype for 4.1 billion dollars. Google had offered 4 billion for the same deal, creating ripples of amazement and trepidation at the quantum of investments pushing into the internet and the growth potential for 2006. The new acquired entity of Skype is expected to bring in 200 million from VoIP services such as SkypeOut.

With a 50 million base Skype will perhaps excel even in the nascent paid models of VoIP, since they can easily test the new method of garnering advertising fees from business people on the net.
In Taiwan, many companies have still been unable to procure necessary licenses to develop requisite Skype-enabled hardware. The process of licensing has been slow due to lack of manpower at Skype.

Teething problems notwithstanding, all big players are gung-ho at increasing the customer base of the net, with WiFi enabling greater internet movement. As the net experience war continues and the online audience expands, it is hoped by these players that more people will remain hooked on to the net.