On Tuesday evening, Microsoft announced that it had acquired Teleo, a provider of Voice over Internet (VoIP) software and services. In combination with its previous VoIP work, Microsoft will be adding more VoIP features to MSN Messenger and other MSN services in the future.
"Teleo has great technology to deliver superior VoIP quality and an excellent overall customer experience," said Microsoft corporate vice president Blake Irving, who runs the MSN Communication Services and Member Platform group at the company. "This acquisition opens up infinite opportunities for Microsoft to enable even more relationship-centric communications experiences for our customers in the future."
Previously a privately-held company, Teleo was planning to introduce a service that would have allowed customers to place phone calls from their PCs using Microsoft Outlook or Internet Explorer (IE). The Teleo software would have allowed users to right-click on any phone number displayed on their PC and dial it from the PC using VoIP technology. Microsoft previously added free VoIP-based PC-to-PC audio and video functionality to MSN Messenger 7.0, which was released in April 2005.
