Busy week!  We're getting ready to launch our new brand and wanted to give you guys a sneak peek at our new website.  It's pretty tight!  We hope it will be a definitive resource for anyone interested in click to call, call tracking and pay per call technology.

There are alot of misconceptions about this space and the different technologies being used, so we hope our new collateral will help clear things up a bit. 

Oh, and in case you missed it, we've also made an announcement regarding our text chat customer service product.  Check it out! 

There was a great posting recently by Zach McGeary over at Jupiter Research about how Amazon has been replacing their customer service numbers with a new click to call feature. He writes, "This move is strategic because it doesn't open the flood gates for inbound customer service phone calls, many of which are likely to be basic and informational in nature (e.g. billing, order status) and the solutions for which are already provided by their very robust account and order management functionality. Instead, this service delivery paradigm also allows Amazon to manage their own service levels more efficiently."

Greg Sterling at the Kelsey Group shares his thoughts on the emergence of local click to call applications.  He senses a definite future for click to call, and similar applications. Check out the Local Media Blog to learn more.

Charles Hudson makes a good observation regarding click-to-call.  In this posting, he mentions that click-to-call is a good way for major web properties to bring new advertisers to the internet.  This is certainly true.  However, eStara's found through its work with Verizon Superpages and Amazon's A9 that directories are using it as a means to re-up and cross-sell existing advertisers aswell, whether they're offering the service on a per call (pay per call) basis or as a value-add to an existing ad package.

 It's clear that local advertisers, particularly service oriented businesses, prefer phone calls to click throughs.  Pay per call seems to be the buzz word to describe this model and the early adoption rates are promising, but it's all driven by click-to-call technology. If you look at the amount of online directories and search engines that are already incorporating click to call (regardless of whether it's on a pay per call basis or not) it's clear that the integration of voice and web will be the new frontier of e-commerce.

We're still working on a translation, but we saw "pay per call" in the headline of this article and thought you guys would get excited about it. As best we can tell, this article describes a partnership between eStara and France Telecom's PagesJaunes, France's premier online yellow pages directory, to provide click-to-call services as a value-add to PagesJaunes' advertisers.

Here's what PagesJaunes has to say about the partnership...

“We’re delighted with this agreement with eStara. Our collaboration is fully in line with the desire of the PagesJaunes Group to provide advertisers and users of pagesjaunes.fr with the best of online services, guaranteeing quality, speed and efficiency,” explains Jean-Marie Guille, Director of Online Activities at PagesJaunes.