| « Simplify Media - Kazaa w/o downloads for iTunes How to make $100 million in 2 weeks? Partner with INS » |
Google announces GrandCentral deal
By Vivek | July 2nd, 2007 at 03:13 pm ET
Like a clockwork, Google has done another acquisition. And for this week it is a slightly bigger one - GrandCentral Communications. As always, no official word on as to how much money was spent, but as the startup had raised $5 million in funding, it has to go in 10x multiple of that.
Anyhow for those of you who haven’t used GrandCentral, the phone+web app lets you bring together all your phone numbers and voicemail boxes into one account. Get one number at GrandCentral, give it out to everyone, and next time anyone calls at that number all your phones will ring. There are quite a few other options and the app is well developed.
However as a standalone offering GrandCentral would definitely have found it tough to sell it’s service since everyone does not have multiple devices and even if they have, they won’t go into hooking up everything together via a relatively unknown service which can start charging any day it wants.
With the expected Google Phone launch later this year and existing Google Talk app, I expect a far bigger integrated offering from the search giant as compared to what Apple has just done that will sync all your contacts all around.
For those of you looking to join in, the new user sign-up is locked down, as expected.
Personally I can’t take advantage of this all around sync ’cause I want to stay away from all the control Google is trying to establish around each and every app we use.
