Google Has Acquired Gizmo5

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/09/exclusive-google-has-acquired-gizmo5/

by transburgh • 17 years ago

90 16 17 years ago

jonknee• 17 years ago

Google Voice may finally turn into something useful... Very cool. I have always preferred Gizmo over Skype because they use open standards.

byoung2• 17 years ago

I'm interested to see the merging of Google Talk and Google Voice. The one missing piece of the puzzle was the SIP infrastructure so you could dial out from Google Voice without using standard phone lines.

jasonlbaptiste• 17 years ago

Mondays. Because we're Google and we feel like buying stuff.

(See admob acquisition for 750 mil earlier today- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=931306)

timdorr• 17 years ago

Yeah, a lot of acquisition news today (EA bought Playfish today too). This is all very good news!

pkulak• 17 years ago

This is pretty awesome. Even before the acquisition you could use a combination of Gizmo5 and Google Voice to get a free phone line, but this could make everything even more seamless.

Xichekolas• 17 years ago

use a combination of Gizmo5 and Google Voice to get a free phone line

Well, you could talk for free anyway. Not long after Google Voice started handing out accounts they changed the requirements so you had to have a traditional 10-digit phone number registered with the account.

I was excited by Google Voice and Gizmo because I wanted to ditch my cell phone all together (I use about 75 minutes a month). Once they added that requirement though, I couldn't.

malbiniak• 17 years ago

I was in the same boat, but managed to get around it by verifying a friends a physical line (cell), leaving it in my account, but disabling it from receiving future calls.

wtallis• 17 years ago

I had my home number linked to my account, but then a third person in the household got a GV number and linked it to our home phone. This caused my account to drop my landline as a forwarding number, but it still works fine with the Gizmo number.

toisanji• 17 years ago

hopefully gizmo on the mac will stop sucking, I have to reinstall gizmo every few weeks because some how the binary gets corrupted and won't start. The only way I can get it to work is to do a reinstall. Other than that issue, it is great to make phone calls totally for free with google voice and gizmo.

run4yourlives• 17 years ago

Interesting.

Direct benefits notwithstanding, Google continues to make forays into the mobile world in ways that suggest they are attempting to route around the biggest bottleneck in the whole thing: the price of network access.

It seems that sometime in the future, Google will be able to provide communication services to individuals without the requirement of leasing a non-google medium, like a cell phone or internet connection.

Such a development will make the RIAA vs. the users question seem like discussing the politics of ink distribution in the days before the printing press.

numbchuckskills• 17 years ago

not so fast...net neutrality (insert evil sound effect) will be the big decider.

oomkiller• 17 years ago

Cool, now maybe I can more easily link my SIP phones and PBXs into Google Voice.

fcu_1• 17 years ago

should've been:

"Google acquires Gizmo5; Skype seeks fresh underwear"

mpk• 17 years ago

Anybody have information on the details of the acquisition?

How many shares did that 6 million investment buy? Is the 30m buying price all cash or are there stocks/shares involved? Will Gizmo5 keep its current management? Are there incentives for key personnel to stay in place?

X buys Y is fairly superficial information here.

Frazzydee• 17 years ago

I hope that Google's takeover will improve the quality of Gizmo5 and bring in a strong competitor to Skype.

I tried to replace Skype with Gizmo5, but two major problems made me go back to Skype:

1) Voice quality on the receiver's side is awful, and the caller's side is too quiet.

This may be partly due to my connection– I was using wifi– but Skype worked without issues. I'm not sure whether this is because of the underlying technology, or because of the PSTN link quality.

2) Payments take a couple days to process, whereas Skype payments process in seconds.

That being said, Gizmo5's pricing is markedly better, which is what prompted me to try it out in the first place.

I think Google is definitely capable of fixing the second problem quickly and effectively. And Google's reputation for excellence gives me hope that the overall quality of Gizmo5 will also improve accordingly.

coryrc• 17 years ago

#2 was recently fixed (at least for me)

My problem is the gizmo5 client uses way more processing power than skype, enough that it doesn't work on my atom laptop.

Google Has Acquired Gizmo5

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