Google is now officially a telco after announcing the acquisition of Grand Central today:
We’re pleased to announce that we have acquired GrandCentral Communications, a company that provides services for managing your voice communications. GrandCentral is an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. We think GrandCentral’s technology fits well into Google’s efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users.
Grand Central is an innovative service which allows you to re-route calls to any one or some of your lines if you have multiple numbers (landline, mobile, etc.) basing from who is making the call. This is like a centralized voice mailbox. You can listen to your voicemails online or from any phone, forward them to anybody, add the caller to your address book, block a caller as spam, and a lot more. You can even listen in on voicemail messages from your phone while they are being recorded, or switch a call from your cell phone to your desk phone and back again.
Now Google Talk can really gain that much needed boost. Can we speculate that you can access and listen to all your voice mailbox from your Google Talk? With all those dark fibers Google has been buying in recent months, will it be possible for them to give away free local and international voip calls — all supported by advertising.
also a prelude to a Google Router :)