Google acquires Web-calling service GrandCentral

Google Inc has acquired GrandCentral Communications, a start-up that lets users manage their existing phones and voice mailboxes over the Web as if they were a single account, the company said on Monday.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Grand Central of Fremont, California is one of dozens of innovative companies that are taking advantage of Web-based software to allow consumers and businesses to make voice calls over the Internet while also working with regular phones. GrandCentral was founded in late 2005 by Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet, who worked together while running Web-calling pioneer Dialpad Communications. Google's biggest rival, Yahoo Inc, acquired Dialpad in June 2005.

"You get a single phone number that forwards to all of your phones, giving you one number for life," Walker and Paquet said in a statement on GrandCentral's Web site confirming the deal. EBay Inc unit Skype, a pioneer in the Internet phone market, has signed up more than 200 million users for its free or low-cost phone services globally. Newer names in the field include venture-backed firms Jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr and Rebtel, which together have signed up millions of users in just the past year.

The idea for GrandCentral was borne out of Walker's frustration upon landing at a local airport and realizing he needed to check three voicemail mail boxes--one for his cell phone, another for work and one for his Blackberry phone. "If you have multiple phone numbers (eg., home, work, cell), you get one phone number that you can set to ring all, some, or none of your phones," Wesley Chan, a Google product manager, said in a blog post on his company's Web site.

"This way, your phone number is tied to you, and not your location or job," he said.

Rather than competing directly with the likes of Vodafone Plc or China Telecom Corp Ltd, many of these newer Web-based calling services are focused on incorporating phone-like talk features into Internet services on blogs or social network sites like MySpace or Facebook. Konstantin Guericke, the co-founder of Silicon Valley-based business networking site LinkedIn took over as the chief executive of Web-calling service Jangl late last year.

"The way I see it, social networks and blogs are about communication and the phone hasn't been really in the mix," Guericke said following news of Google's acquisition. GrandCentral has been holding public tests of its service for several months. Current GrandCentral customers will continue to have uninterrupted service, Google said. However, one feature that allowed users to upload their own audio tracks to create ringtones now will be limited to licensed music, GrandCentral said on its own site.

A limited number of invitations to receive GrandCentral unified numbers will be available for users who sign up at http://www.grandcentral.com, it said. "We think GrandCentral's technology fits well into Google's efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users," Chan said. Google did not disclose future products plans it has in the area. But voice-calling features will quickly be built into many popular Web sites over the next three months to a year, Guericke said. "We think there is a billion-dollar business to be built, so we have no plans to get acquired any time soon."

In the last five weeks, Jangl has seen the number of registered users of its service on sites like Facebook grow to 300,000 users from 100,000 on May 25, he said.

Source: expressindia

Yahoo introduces robots-nocontent for page sections

"Webmasters can now mark parts of a page with a 'robots-nocontent' tag which will indicate to our crawler what parts of a page are unrelated to the main content and are only useful for visitors.

We won't use the terms contained in these special tagged sections as information for finding the page or for the abstract in the search results

Addressing some comments and questions, with regards to links, the 'robots-nocontent' does not in any way affect how links are treated.

All links will continue to be used to find targets and will carry attribution to the target if they do not have the 'rel=nofollow' tag on them, whether or not they are inside a 'robots-nocontent' section."

Courtesy: ysearchblog

Google PageRank Update on April 28

Google is updating the Pagerank. Last Page Rank update was on January.
After two months google has again updated its page rank.

Google testing TV ads in California

The WSJ is reporting (behind paywall) that Google is conducting a small scale test of television advertisements in the Northern California town of Concord (east of San Francsicso), and there are additional rumors that Google is close to signing a deal with Dish Network, a satellite television provider, to supply advertising to its television subscribers.

The article also notes that the total size of the television advertising market in the U.S. is $54 billion annually, which is much larger than Google’s current $20 billion/year playground, online advertising.

There is no information on how much Google is planning on assisting advertisers in creating the ads. Their audio advertising product, also still in testing, contains basic creation tools and access to voice professionals.

Spotrunner, an online startup that assists advertisers with ad creation and buying, has gained a lot of momentum in the last year. Rumors are always circulating that Google or someone else will acquire the company. These tests do nothing to suggest an acquisition is more or less likely - only that Google is definitely looking at the space. Spotrunner has raised $60 million in financing.

Source: techcrunch.com

What Google could do if they were evil

You probably know Google's informal company motto "Don't be evil". Google is a very successful company that knows a lot about its advertisers and users. In addition, Google has a market share that would allow them do certain things.

What could Google do if they were evil? Note that the following is only hypothetical:

Google could favor its own products and websites

Google could prefer websites from its own services in the search results: websites that run Google ads, websites that use Google's payment service, Blogger sites, Google Base, etc.

All websites that pay Google in some way could be preferred in the search results while others are downranked.

Google could punish websites at discretion

If Google doesn't like your website or if someone tells Google that you're a bad boy then Google can ban your website from the search results without any reason given.

You can find a lot of articles on the web that discuss the problem that Google removed web sites from the index. The main problem with these removals is that Google usually doesn't explain why a web site has been removed so that webmasters often are complete and utterly at Google's mercy.

Google could use your data against you

Most Google products now use a single account. That means that Google knows a lot about you if you use their services: your address, your credit card number, the web pages that you visit, the web sites that you own, how much you earn with your web site (if you use Google's analytics product), etc.

Google could sell this information to other companies, the government or any other person that pays for it. If one of your web sites causes a problem with Google, they could ban all of your sites. There's a lot that Google could do with the information they have about you.

Google could force webmasters to advertise

Google could decide that web sites that advertise on Google get better rankings in the search results. They could also decide that companies with big wallets don't get high rankings so that they have to advertise more.

Companies that use Google's analytics software to track their sales tell Google how much they earn. That allows Google to raise the advertising costs based on the revenue of the company.

Google could do most of the things above and it would be very difficult to prove that they actually do it because Google doesn't reveal the ranking algorithm. Maybe you know the saying "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Let's hope that Google can resist the temptations of their power.

Inside AdWords: Pay-per-action beta test

Inside AdWords: Pay-per-action beta test

Google accepting applications for AdSense referrals beta

Google launched Adsense referral beta where users can select products and services from AdWords advertisers.

You can select which ads to display on your site by either choosing relevant ads or letting Google do the work for you.

You can simply provide a few keywords to describe your site and your users' interests, and you'll see ads automatically displayed that perform best for your site.

With referrals, you'll be paid when visitors click through to an advertiser's site and complete an action defined by your advertisers, such as a sale or sign up.

This feature is currently available on a limited basis as part of Google's beta test.

Source: ISEDB.COM