Google confirmed its intention to acquire Gizmo5, an Internet telephony company, with plans to merge the group into the Google Voice team.
The pending acquisition had been reported earlier in the week by Techcrunch but was overshadowed by the announcement of Google's third-largest acquisition to date--the US$750 million AdMob deal--on the same day. Late Thursday Google confirmed that it had acquired the company, although financial terms of this deal were not disclosed.
Gizmo5 is a Web-based VoIP client that lets you make phone calls over the Internet, similar to programs like Skype. It's based, however, on an open standard called SIP that fits a little better into Google's worldview, rather than Skype's internally-developed system.
Gizmo5 works on both PCs and mobile phones, and the technology will likely be used in some way to enhance Google Voice. Google Voice isn't a VoIP client; it lets you use a single number to ring multiple phones and get voice mails transcribed into e-mail, but it does that over existing phone networks.
As Google figures out exactly what it wants to do with Gizmo5, it is suspending new sign-ups for the service, but current users will still be able use it.
This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.
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