Can't spare five bucks to call Aunt Martha on the East Coast?
Now you can do it for free on the Net.
Dialpad.com, a spinoff of Serome Technologies, offers free Web-to-phone service.
The service, only one week old, is already making a hit on the Stanford campus, for one.
"I was pretty instantly sold as soon as I saw it and saw how it worked," said senior David Weekly, who heard about the service from a mailing list.
"You no longer have this nervous twitch or guilty feeling when you're talking to someone long distance," Weekly said. "[You don't] worry about racking up a big phone bill."
Hyunduk Ahn, CEO of the company, said that's what the company aims to achieve.
"We're concentrating on providing a convenient and useful tool for Web users," Ahn said.
Users sign up for the free service on the dialpad.com site. The company created a Java-based applet that automatically downloads with the click of the mouse. When the applet pops up on screen, the user types in the phone number and the call is made.
"We couldn't make it simpler than that," Ahn said.
The number is digitally transmitted through GTE Internetworking, a private fiber-optics network, that converts the digital packets into an analog signal that is sent to the phone being called.
Users must have a computer microphone and speaker to use the service, which come with most machines anyway.
Web phones are not a new idea. Sites like Net2Phone,WebPhone.com, and deltathree.com offer similar services. However, this is the first company that offers the service for free.
That is key, said Weekly, because people can try it without worrying about spending any money.
The site has seen its traffic grow by 10,000 new users daily since its launch on 18 October.
And so far calls are averaging more than three minutes, which shows that people are actually making conversation, Ahn said.
The site credits word-of-mouth to the rapid growth. They have not advertised yet but plan to do some test marketing next month.
"We'll get a single user from an obscure company and then about five more the next day," Ahn said. "People are talking to each other about this."
Stanford's Weekly told friends about the site who also passed it on. Weekly estimated that 10 to 15 percent of the Stanford campus has heard about the site, and the number is growing, he said.
Even with its growing popularity, Ahn acknowledged that the Web-to-phone service was not perfect.
"We're not claiming that it's crystal clear like a regular phone," Ahn said. "But we think it's close to cell phone quality."
"The sound quality was excellent," Weekly said. He said the only complaint he had was that the service is currently only available on PCs.
Banner ads cover the cost of running the site and Ahn said there are no plans to charge for the service in the future.
The company plans to partner with portals, address book, and yellow pages sites so when a user locates a number, he can easily type it in on the dialpad applet and make the call.
