Yahoo is to buy Dialpad, a company that provides Internet telephony services. The company plans to use the acquisition to enable it to provide its own Internet telephony services, which it expects to deliver within the next several months.
"By combining Dialpad's technology and expertise with the technology we've already built in this area we can basically get to that next level at a much more rapid pace and scale more quickly" for the 61.7 million Yahoo Messenger users worldwide, said Joanna Stevens, Yahoo vice president of corporate communications.
Yahoo has for some time kept no secret of its intention to compete in voice services, having called voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) the new online killer application when the company updated its Yahoo Messenger with featured VoIP services. The latest Yahoo Messenger features a "Call Computer" button to enable VoIP communications.