But today AT&T is announcing that they’ve acquired the company and plan to integrate it into its directory service and local search advertising portfolio (yellowpages.com, etc.). The Pay Per Call service will allow advertisers to reach potential leads.

Ingenio was founded in 1999. Terms are not being disclosed, although AT&T is saying it expects the deal to close in January 2008.

Looking for a link to the press release. A draft is below.

Press Release

AT&T Agrees to Acquire Ingenio, a Pioneer and Leading Provider of Pay Per Call Search and Directory Solutions

SAN ANTONIO, Nov. 19 — AT&T Inc. announced today that an AT&T subsidiary has agreed to acquire privately held Ingenio, a leading provider of Pay Per Call(R) technology. The transaction is expected to close in early January 2008.

AT&T plans to integrate Ingenio’s Pay Per Call solutions into its directory service and local search advertising portfolio, including the YELLOWPAGES.COM Network, AT&T Real Yellow Pages and 1-800-Yellow Pages. Ingenio’s Pay Per Call service is an advertising platform that allows businesses to manage their ad programs and generate valuable phone leads. The platform uses proprietary technology to provision unique published phone numbers to track calls to businesses generated by those ads, and advertisers’ fees are based on the volume of these leads.

Pay Per Call technology will provide another lead generation tool for advertisers to reach customers. Integrating Ingenio’s Pay Per Call technology will enable AT&T to take advantage of a growing trend toward performance-based advertising. The move also demonstrates AT&T’s commitment to providing advertisers with comprehensive solutions – the addition of Ingenio’s Pay Per Call technology will give advertisers the flexibility to purchase leads in a consistent manner across online, mobile or print media whether or not they have a Web site.

“As advertisers add performance-based advertising to their marketing mix, this investment makes sense for our business,” said Ray Wilkins, AT&T group president-Diversified Business. “Ingenio’s technology will allow AT&T to expand our robust service portfolio for print, online and mobile advertisers, and that will further differentiate us from our competitors.”

Following the closing of the acquisition, Ingenio will be integrated within AT&T’s YELLOWPAGES.COM and will be overseen by Charles Stubbs, president and CEO of YELLOWPAGES.COM. AT&T expects to retain Ingenio’s management team. The transaction is expected to have minimal impact on AT&T’s results, including earnings per share.

“As advertising options continue to evolve and businesses look to additional options, Ingenio’s technology will help us fulfill these needs,” Stubbs said. “Pay Per Call advertising will allow us to serve millions of businesses — those with and without Web sites. We can provide alternatives and additional value to advertisers by adding performance-based solutions to our suite of interactive product offerings.”

“Throughout the past few years, we have built and deployed innovative products that help the services economy flourish online,” said Mark Britto, president and CEO of Ingenio. “What we have lacked, however, is scale — the ability to bring those solutions to the market in the biggest possible way. Our merger with AT&T allows us to bring our innovations to more businesses nationwide.”

“Ingenio’s technology and products deliver an innovative approach for lead generation and help advertisers efficiently place themselves in front of consumers who are ready to act,” Britto said. “Combining Ingenio’s capabilities with AT&T’s resources and YELLOWPAGES.COM’s strong reach and brand is great news for advertisers and creates a foundation to expand this business.”

The addition of Ingenio further enhances AT&T’s portfolio of directory offerings. YELLOWPAGES.COM and AT&T Real Yellow Pages deliver unsurpassed visibility and value to advertisers. AT&T delivers print directories to more than 83 million residences and businesses in 22 states and has a premier online presence nationwide with the YELLOWPAGES.COM Network.

Together, these products receive more than 5 billion consumer searches a year for local business information and provide more than 1 million advertisers with valuable sales leads to help their businesses grow.

AT&T’s YELLOWPAGES.COM also recently expanded its mobile search products with a new Web application for iPhone users, as well as a downloadable local search application that is currently available on 20 popular AT&T handset models. These applications make it easy for consumers to find what they need, when they need it and extend YELLOWPAGES.COM advertisers’ presence to on-the- go consumers.

Note: This AT&T release and other news announcements are available as part of an RSS feed at http://www.att.com/rss.

About AT&T

AT&T Inc. is a premier communications holding company. Its subsidiaries and affiliates, AT&T operating companies, are the providers of AT&T services in the United States and around the world. Among their offerings are the world’s most advanced IP-based business communications services and the nation’s leading wireless, high speed Internet access and voice services. In domestic markets, AT&T is known for the directory publishing and advertising sales leadership of its Yellow Pages and YELLOWPAGES.COM organizations, and the AT&T brand is licensed to innovators in such fields as communications equipment. As part of its three-screen integration strategy, AT&T is expanding its TV entertainment offerings. Additional information about AT&T Inc. and the products and services provided by AT&T subsidiaries and affiliates is available at http://www.att.com/.

(C) 2007 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved. AT&T, the AT&T logo and all other marks contained herein are trademarks of AT&T Intellectual Property and/or AT&T affiliated companies. For more information, please review this announcement in the AT&T newsroom at http://www.att.com/newsroom.

About YELLOWPAGES.COM

YELLOWPAGES.COM LLC is a subsidiary of AT&T Inc. Formed in late 2004, the company operates a leading IYP and local search site, YELLOWPAGES.COM. The YELLOWPAGES.COM Nationwide Network provides exposure to up to more than 34 million monthly unique visitors (comScore Media Metrix, September 2007).

About Ingenio

Founded in 1999, Ingenio, Inc. the leader in live-search commerce, is helping the services economy flourish online by connecting millions of buyers and sellers around the world. Ingenio applications offer sellers the tools to acquire and monetize customers while providing consumers a means to interact with sellers rather than websites. Ingenio live-search commerce applications include: Pay Per Call(R), a pay-for-performance advertising service that enables the purchase of live customer phone calls generated through Ingenio Inc’s online and mobile search advertising network. Ingenio earn per call applications, Ether(R) and Live Advice, empower live experts to sell their services to individuals seeking real-time, personal and customized answers to their questions. For more information please visit http://www.ingenio.com/.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

I drafted some real-time notes of the products demo’d and launched at event at CrunchNotes, and my more complete notes are below.

Attensa	Ether	lifeio
Netvibes	PostApp	PROTOMOBL
Sharpcast	SoonR	StumbleUpon
Vpod.tv	Webaroo	ZiXXo

Sharpcast

Palo Alto-based Sharpcast (TechCrunch posts here) has developed a platform to sync application data across your computers and mobile devices. Their first showcase application is Sharpcast Photos, which not only pushes photos from one device/computer to others, it also keeps them synced. Make a change on one and it pushes the changes to the other copies as well. There are lots of new applicaitions coming as well (documents, calendar, contacts). The company, which has raised $16.5 million in capital, will be application-agnostic so you don’t have to switch to using new software. Windows only today, Mac coming soon.

Webaroo

Webaroo, headquartered in Santa Clara is a new service that launched in April that allows PC users (no Mac support yet) users to access cached web content when they are offline. Webaroo offers pre-selected content, called “web packs”, and users can also cache whatever websites they would like to have access to. For more, see the TechCrunch Webaroo review here.

PostApp

PostApp is a new company that allows users to pull web services directly into their blog or other website without having the technical skills to use the API supplied by the service provider. With the explosion of widgets, PostApp may be the right application at the right time. They also secured $1.5 million in funding from Hummer Winblad. See the full profile here.

Vpod.tv

Vpod.tv was one of my favorite companies presenting at a conference in Spain last month. It is a video sharing site, similar to YouTube, but that focuses on transcoding to most video devices (ipod, PSP, etc.) and allowing users to download video to those devices. They also have an innovative approach to monetization. See the full TechCrunch post here, which also discusses their $5.1 million funding.

Ether

Ether officially launched at Supernova. They’ve created an “ebay for services” that allows people who wish to sell their time on the phone to do so. Place an Ether logo on your site – when someone clicks on it they can set up a time to speak with you according to the terms you’ve set (price, time of call, etc.). When your phone rings, there is a person on the other end who has already given their credit card information and is looking for your advice. Ether went into beta in March, and we covered the official launch here.

Lifeio

Bruce Spector from attap gave the Supernova audience a very early look at Lifeio, “the new life organizer”. Lifeio will combine instant messaging, email, calendaring, contacts, to-do lists, etc in a multipage Ajax site (from what I saw it looks like Lifeio is competing with Goowy, Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc.). Lifeio is also opensourcing the platform framework, called jitsu. Look for more details as the September launch date approaches, and sign up for the beta on the Lifeio homepage.

Other attap companies include Riffs, Buzzvote and personal DNA.

GearON

GearON, a mobile service launching this month from ProtoMobl, centers on your phone’s contact list and creates a social network around it to share photos, music, events and venue information. See the flash demo of GearON here to get a better idea of what it’s all about. Their launch will be covered on MobileCrunch as well as here at TechCrunch.

Soonr

Soonr is a new mobile platform that we’ve previously covered at TechCrunch. One of the most useful applications they’ve launched so far is the ability to use Skype on a normal cell phone (all you pay for are the Skype-out charges from Skype to your own cell, and you can then use Skype to call anyone on your Skype list). The Mac version of Soonr was announced at Supernova.

Zixxo

There are a few ways to look at Zixxo. For users they will deliver highly targeted local and national coupons to you based on whatever personal and demographic information you choose to share with them. For businesses, they are a very cost-effective way of reaching consumers who actually want to receive these coupons. For third parties there is a revenue share opportunity for bringing users and/or businesses to the network. Zixxo is still very young, but the core idea is strong. Look for a potential quick acquisition of this company if they start to get traction.

Attensa

Craig Barnes, the CEO of Attensa, talked about how his suite of RSS reader applications (mobile, outlook, online) analyze user behaviors to recommend specific content and help people deal with information overload. They’ve also just released a new version of Attensa for outlook. TechCrunch posts on Attensa are here.

Netvibes

Founder and Co-CEO Tariq Krim gave the audience an overview of London and Paris-based Netvibes, the Ajax home page that has seen tremendous growth and now has millions of passionate users. Netvibes now has an active community of independent developers creating modules for the site. Netvibes is on a roll. TechCrunch posts are here.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a social browsing application. Users download a browser toolbar and can find popular sites in different categories, vote on sites, etc. Stumbleupon has nearly 1 million registered users in 139 countries, who “stumble” 2.2 million sites er day. Advertisers can get their ads in front of a targeted audience for 5 cents an impression. I use this service.

Ether is a service of San Francisco based Ingenio, a company founded in 1999 that says it does 20 million minutes of paid voice commerce transactions each quarter for customers including AOL, Microsoft, YellowPages.com, and the IRS.

Ether seems like a pretty cool model, though concerns are consistently raised about the quality of offerings available. Looking around the site and doing a search for the Ether code in the blogosphere, probably the classiest case of this service put to use so far is by our fellow new web service review blogger, Pete Cashmore. Maybe I’m just saying that because I have a soft spot for new web service review bloggers, though.

See also our previous coverage of Ether when it launched into beta for more info and discussion.

The concept of Ether is straightforward, but it has a massive back end infrastructure (thankfully Ingenio already had it built). They call it an “ebay for services”, allowing people to charge for advice over the phone (and by email – more on that below).

Service providers set up an account by providing some personal information and a phone number that they would like to be called at. Any service that can be provided over the phone is a perfect match for Ether. “Sellers” set their price, from free to anything (on a per minute or per hour basis). They can tell Ether the hours they are willing to take calls. Every seller is issued a toll free phone number (with a dedicated extension), which forwards to their phone.

Buyers can search through providers, see prices, feedback, etc. Once they agree to terms, they can place the call. Sellers only get calls once a Buyer has paid the fee and agreed to the terms.

Ether takes a flat 15% of fees for its trouble. They cover long distance charges and credit card processing fees out of this 15%.

And the fun doesn’t stop there. Sellers can also sell any type of digital content through Ether as well. The buyer is able to access the content only after paying the agreed upon fee. This content can be emailed out to people, or accessed via a link/badge that can be placed on a website.

The combination of phone advice, plus the ability to charge for digital content, opens up all kinds of possibilities. At first glance, I saw this as a kind of Web 2.0 elance…but after testing out the service its clear that it goes way beyond what previous services in this space did. Ether brings people together directly via calls or email, and sets up a great billing mechanism in between the parties. I expect Ether to ramp quickly towards success, and it will be extremely hard for competitors to enter the space given the capital intensive infrastructure needed to do something like this.

See Robert Scoble on Ether as well, who met with the team last week and asks “Anyone have any ideas of how they’d use Ether?”

Ether says they’ll launch in three weeks.