Patent ID: 8542807

Claim:
A computer implemented method to establish a data link between parties, each party having a computer and a dial up telephone, the method comprising operations of: using the telephones, the parties establishing a dial up telephone connection over a public telephone network either directly or via a conference calling bridge; the computers connecting to a prescribed packet data network and automatically acquiring addresses on said prescribed packet data network; any of the computers, the telephones, or the conference calling bridge identifying the parties to any of the computers or a rendezvous server, the identifying operation carried out automatically by employing computational analysis of acoustical content of the telephone connection; any of the computers or the rendezvous server using said identification of the parties to automatically establish a data link between the computers via the prescribed packet data network and said addresses on the prescribed packet data network without introducing machine-readable acoustic signals into said dial up telephone connection; and the computers employing the established data link to exchange multimedia content representing human-readable communications between the parties.