Vonage Eyes Australia, Courts Web Chatters

[Jeff]

Reports from down under suggest Vonage is preparing a launch in Australia, which would become the fourth country in which it is active (following the United States, Canada and the U.K.). Meanwhile, Vonage inked a pact with chat-room specialist Paltalk, under which its VoIP service will be offered to those of the roughly 3.5 million Paltalk users who live in the countries served by Vonage.

The indications that Vonage is looking at Australia came in a report in the Australian Financial Review that Vonage hired executive search firm Shakers Recruitment to help it hire “a group of operations, finance and marketing executives to launch the company in Australia in the coming months.” Vonage hasn’t commented publicly on the report or discussed its Australian plans.

The news has the Australian community in a tizzy. Local analysts busily are trying to estimate the effect a Vonage market entry will have on incumbent Telstra. Local VoIP house Engin, a subsidiary of Vodafone Australia wireless reseller Mobile Innovations, reportedly is seeking to double its capitalization in order to launch a marketing blitz, in part to fend off the Vonage threat. Engin currently has about 9,000 users, of whom 6,000 are paying customers and 3,000 use only its free peer-to-peer service. It’s planning to raise $4.4 million, about half earmarked for the marketing program.

Meanwhile, Vonage says that, under its deal with Paltalk, the instant chat community specialist will offer Vonage service to its users. Paltalk, in addition to hosting chat rooms, offers users voice and video compatibility with instant messenger users signed up for MSN, AOL, Yahoo! and ICQ.

The theory is that Paltalk users already are tuned in to the use of VoIP – albeit free VoIP – and thus could prove a lucrative market for Vonage to mine. Vonage and Paltalk, which brags of being the largest instant chat community on the Internet, did not disclose how they plan to solicit Paltalk users. The Paltalk service is free, but it does come with attached advertising pushed to users while they communicate on the service.

Source: Telecom Web