VoIP and ENUM

The blogosphere seems to be full of Google's latest gag: Google and VoIP Inc. Testing Click-to-Call Advertising. Alec Saunders has quite a good overview and also an interesting analysis.

TMCnet has learned that Google's peering deal with VoIP Inc. reported on yesterday by news analyst Robert Liu (see "VoIP Inc. Enters into Peering Deal with Google") is connected with a click-to-call advertising test the two companies began in late 2005.

So what is the news? Click-to-Dial is nothing new. It is around for some years, it was the first VoIP application Telekom Austria launched (I think it was 2001 or 2002), selling buttons you could place on your webpage, establishing a voice call to your 1-800 call-center directly out of the browser without needing a VoIP client. It was not a big success, nobody knew about it, there where compatibility problems, audio problems (no broadband, no multimedia PC, etc).

It was too early and is was not supported by the right marketing campaign.

I am really interested if Google will do better now. Could be, times have changed and Google has also the better enviroment for such a product. It fits quite well into their other products.