DEMO: Zingaya brings VOIP to toll-free calls

Zingaya is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

As the relevance of traditional phone lines begins to fade, Internet calling is entering a golden age — and a new startup is looking to apply it to toll-free 800 numbers, where calls are typically routed to landlines.

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Zingaya is looking to cut the costs of 800 numbers by providing a voice-over-Internet-protocol solution that allows consumers to call customer service representatives directly from the website. The audio data from consumers’ calls is crunched into a format similar to those used by services like Skype. The service is currently embedded on websites with Flash, but Zingaya is looking at moving it to HTML5, the latest version of HTML, the Web’s common language for pages, which promises wider compatibility across Web-capable devices.

Zingaya, founded in 2008, is currently run by a team of five that formerly worked on Flaphone, another Web-based phone app. It competes with other VOIP web services like Ribbit and Google Calling.

Zingaya has landed a well-known advisor, Esther Dyson. The company is currently self-funded with profits from the founders’ previous software-licensing venture and does not have outside investors.

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