Google to challenge Skype

Monday, July 16, 2007


Online search giant Google, last week made its move against ebay-owned VoIP company Skype, with the purchase of startup commpany GrandCentral Communications.

Wesley Chan, Google's product manager posted on the official Google blog on Monday confirming the deal:

"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."

Google will be offering a limited number of invite-only GrandCentral beta accounts to users with US telephone numbers, while current GrandCentral subscribers will continue to have uninterrupted access to this service.

Google has not released the terms of the deal yet, but speculation by TechCrunch has valued the deal at around $50 million -- small change for a company who's recent acquisitions have included YouTube ($1.65 Billion), and DoubleClick ($3.1 Billion).

Skpye was purchased by online auction giant eBay for $2.6 Billion back in 2005, and has been a fixture on their web since it was founded back in 2002. Compared to the $2.6 Billion paid by eBay, the estimated $50 Million for Google’s GrandCentral purchase sounds like quite the bargain.

GrandCentral’s beta version was originally just released in September of 2006.

GTalk is already a very impressive chat application in it's own right, so it will be quite interesting to see how Google will implement GrandCentral into future GTalk updates.