VoIP

Panning for Gold

They say that the people who made real money from the California gold rush weren't miners, but the people selling the shovels. This year's gold rush in California is VoIP, and one innovative Californian company is offering small businesses a new e-commerce shovel: click to call.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 8, 2004]

We call Sean Wani, vice president of business development at Mountain View, Cali.-based thinkingVOICE, by clicking on a link in an e-mail he sent us. The company employs a proprietary implementation of a SIP stack to enable the gee whiz click to call feature.

When you click on the link, which can be anywhere you'd find a link, such as a website or e-mail, you are directed to a Web form. Fill in your name, phone number, e-mail address, and reason for calling, and the application calls the person at the other end, sending an SMS or e-mail message with the data you filled out. Then the SMS engine calls you, using the number you just entered into the form.

DC Culliname, CEO and founder of thinkingVOICE , says that the Web is all about enabling the little guy to compete. "I'm kind of an impulse buyer, but I buy from non-brand name folks," he says. "Sometimes, I struggle with the interface, so I want to call or e-mail them. There's so many people selling on the Internet, and I'm not comfortable with all of them."

A phone call changes the dynamic completely, Culliname says. "It takes away the impersonal part of the Internet so people feel more comfortable with the transaction."

He's particularly optimistic about the technology's applicability to eBay. "This technology solves a problem. It's a problem that's smaller than the problem Paypal solved, but nevertheless, the need is growing, and it does represent a component of the daily life of businesses selling on the Internet."

Culliname reports that one power seller reduced the amount of time each phone call required from 6 minutes to 3 minutes, just by knowing which of many active eBay auctions the caller was interested in when they called.

The ISP opportunity
When we last spoke to Wani, he was with San Rafael, Calif.-based LetterClick, and was pitching a program to put logos on e-mail. He helped create and sell LetterClick's ISP program.

He believes this is an even bigger opportunity for ISPs. It's about allowing businesses that are phone-based to place a contact point on the Web. Now, you don't even need a website. You can advertise on google, for example, and simply link to your thinkingVOICE teleform. Here, for example, is the teleform of a car dealership that sells on eBay as well as offline (this particular company's website is BidCars).

Wani points out that someone paying $100,000 for a red Ferrari will probably want to talk to the seller before placing a final bid. With thinkingVOICE, they can. The seller can either receive a message on a form if the agent is busy on the dealership's showroom floor, or can take the call directly if they're between customers.

"If you look at the number of businesses that are selling today online, it's still just a drop in the bucket compared to the number that are out there," says Wani. "The mode of business communication is still the phone." Make that the Internet phone.

Pricing and availability
The company's database application for calls and call logs comes with an SDK and an API for connecting the call logs to a billing application.

A thinkingVOICE account capable of creating up to 10 different links (each connecting to a different phone number) costs $6.95 per month plus 15 cents per minute for the phone call (because the SIP application makes two phone calls—one to the buyer and one to the seller). A user can change the phone number the link is directed to, so that, for example, it connects to the work phone during the day and to a home phone at night.

ISPs receive a revenue share. The percentage of the monthly fees depends on the total number of subscribers to the service, and the percentage of the per minute fees varies according to the ISP's guaranteed number of minutes used per month, which can be as low as zero minutes.

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