VOIP and Google: The GrandCentral Acquisition
Source: asteriskblog.com
Early this month Google announced its acquisition of VOIP company GrandCentral Communications, a Freemont California – based VOIP company that provides a smart “universal phone number that rings all your phones” as well as a plethora of features that certainly makes your phones a lot more interesting, useful and powerful.
GrandCentral provides the following features:
Screen Callers – lets you know who are calling and screen unknown callers
ListenIn – hear about the caller before taking the call
Call Record – allows you to record calls on the fly and provides an online access for these recodings
Block Callers – allows you to block unwanted callers
Notifications – lets you receive voicemail notification thru email or SMS
Ring Different Phones – perhaps the killer feature of grandcentral, this provides a capability of ringing a different phone based on who’s calling
Greetings – allows you to create personalized voicemail greetings by caller or group
RingShare – provides ringback tones for your callers
WebCall Button – allows people to call you from a web page but still keeping your number hidden
CallSwitch – allows you to switch phones in the middle of a call
Click2Call – call from your address book without typing any number
Mobile Access – provides visual way to access your voicemail randomly.
With these, features GrandCentral could really have been a good candidate for an acquisition by a bigger company like Google. Indeed GrandCentral caught some interests when it launched late last year during the DEMO conference. Techcrunch gave it a glaring review, and a very good outlook for its future.
Google has been toying with VOIP for a while with its Google Talk product although in terms of number of users and functionality, Talk is not as competitive with the rest of the players like Skype and other Instant Messenging / VOIP products. It’s also a well-know “secret” that Google is very interested in getting involved with the telecommunication business. It has bought a lot of dark fiber in the past and lately it has been vigorous in lobbying for important issues in the industry (the upcoming auction of the 700MHz spectrum is one example).
Could its GrandCentral acquisition bolster its VOIP efforts? This is a very high possibility. GrandCentral’s expertise and feature set has a very good potential of being integrated into Google’s existing communication products, and other future telecommunications efforts.
