Google last Thursday announced their acquisition of Gizmo5, a Californian-based VoIP communications network that deals with internet voice calls and instant messaging. With its growing range of communication services it will be interesting to see what Google’s long term plans will be with this purchase.
Currently the search engine already offers Google Voice in the United States as well as Google Talk and Gmail services Worldwide. The attainment of Gizmo5 will give Google the technologies for complete management of voice, video and text communications. It has been reported earlier last week by TechCrunch that this has cost Google a purchase price of around 30 million dollars.
Announced on their own blog post Google spoke about how the Gizmo5 engineers would be joining their Voice team but have not outlined how the company’s services are going to be combined. The Voice service provided by Google was created by another acquisition two years ago of a company called Grand Central, an additional internet communications start-up.
Google’s interest in internet-based communications technology has been rather clear since the launch of Gmail in 2004 and in the following year, Talk. Talk is a service that allows for computer to computer messaging and voice calls, similar to the internet service Skype. Later Google then added extra features to Gmail to allow both voice and video chat between account holders.
Currently there have been quite a few limitations with Google Voice, including it only being available within the States and users being able to set up calls between traditional landline telephones but unable to connect to internet networks such as Google Talk and Skype.
Now with Gizmo5 this may provide a solution for this technological restraint, opening up possibilities of a further integration of Voice with other online applications such as the new collaboration tool Wave. It also allows Google’s online communication service the possibility of being rolled out worldwide as the new service is software-based and users will not require any direct dealings with local telephone companies unless they wish to use local numbers.
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