Start-up eStara lets Web sites talk to customers

by Tim Greene

January 3, 2001 —

RESTON, VA. -- If you want to talk to your customers through your Web site, you might want to enlist eStara, a start-up specializing in connecting call center phones to PCs.

The company says its OneClick Contact IP phone connections use compression, buffering and proprietary algorithms as well as a private IP backbone to counter delay that can destroy the quality of IP phone calls.

To use the service, eStara customers add HTML code and an icon to their Web page. Web shoppers click on the icon, which links them to an eStara voice server. The server passes an applet to the customer's PC, where it checks that the PC has a microphone and speakers.

If it does, the server calls the call center run by the owner of the Web site via a voice gateway and patches the customer through to a call agent.

The server can detect if the PC is protected by a firewall. If so, it sends voice traffic as TCP packets using a private scheme that cuts the TCP overhead. Otherwise, the voice is sent as User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets.

The applet lets the call agent adjust the sensitivity of the customer's microphone by pressing buttons on the agent's phone. The agent can also punch in sequences of numbers to push a new Web page to the customer.

EStara won't state its prices, but it charges an initial setup fee and then bills according to how many customers click through to talk.

EStara: www.estara.com

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