October 25th, 2005
Will News Corp. buy SIPphone for Myspace integration?
Om Malik is a technology journalist and blogger universally respected for his insights, his breadth of knowledge, and yes, his expansive list of contacts.
When Om forecasts something, I automatically give his prognostications an air of plausibility, if not probability.
Such as today, when Om that he thinks News Corp. - they of Fox News, DirecTV, etc., might well be holding talks with SIPphone, the developer of the Gizmo Project softphone client. Om thinks that with a base of around 250,000 highly loyal users - and working with eBay’s purchase price for Skype based on actual users, that SIPphone could fetch $50 million in a sale.
Those numbers sound about right to me, especially for a model that would find SIPphone as a PC to PSTN client accessible to users of NewsCorp.’s Myspace social network service. You know, find a friend, click this icon, and the Gizmo VoIP client comes up. Then, if the Myspace member allows himself or herself to receive calls, a trust-based system could be implemented by Myspace to release member phone numbers to users who agree to be contacted by interested fellow members.
"Hmm," I am thinking to myself as my second cup o’ Joe kicks in. "Maybe Match.com could use a softphone client, too?"
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
