The big news today, as reported by Om Malik: Yahoo! got serious about adding VoIP to its portfolio and acquired Dialpad, the well-known VoIP operator.  Almost everyone I know used Dialpad for free calls to the US at some point circa 1999 (this was due to the agreement that it had in place with GTE, to put some traffic on GTE's network).  Then, as usage went up, calls were being cut-off after three minutes (or was it a minute?), and then Dialpad became a paid service.  Granted the uptake might have not been as phenomenal as with Skype (and the freebie calls were only for the US), but Dialpad certainly had a huge base of customers, many of which were lost as the company transitioned towards prepaid services.  Fast forward to 2005, and now Yahoo! sees potential to make inroads in the telecom space and offer new services such as PC to phone and inbound calls.  Interestingly enough, Yahoo! will integrate Dialpad functionality into its IM client, which is the mirror image of what Skype did (i.e. add IM on top of a softphone platform).

Yahoo! gets a quick entry to VoIP services on its own terms, rather than relying upon the services of other companies (such as Yahoo's own past use of Net2Phone).  Moreover, Dialpad also has a lot of billing/OSS expertise, in addition to fraud management detection. 

So the million dollar question is: how will MSN and/or Google react?  Can this open the door to some new acquisitions of VoIP SPs?  What about Skype?  Mr. Zennström (the CEO) certainly does not appear to be in a big rush to sell, but will the VCs and other Skype execs consider a sale at an attractive valuation?  We will soon find out...