Google Buys AdMob and Gizmo5
When Google opens their wallet, big buyouts follow, and this time it's iPhone/mobile advertising company AdMob for $750 million, and VoIP startup Gizmo5 for about $30 million.
AdMob is an obvious choice for Google, as it's built mobile and in-app advertising (especially on the iPhone) into a $100 million a year business, enough to get Brin and Page personally involved in the courtship. Says TechCrunch:
Google is gunning hard to dominate mobile Web advertising and AdMob has an early foothold in the display side. [...] Google’s purchase price tells us it thinks the opportunity for mobile display ads is in the billions of dollars, at the very least.
Gizmo5, rather than advertising, could help round out Google's services portfolio. Again, TechCrunch has the details:
Google Talk allows voice calls between users but has no PSTN link to allow incoming or outbound calls to real phones. Gizmo5 does this well already. [...] And Google Voice is a great VoIP and phone identity service, but they have no endpoint for calls. Gizmo5, which by the way already integrates with Google Voice, is a soft phone end point for Google phone users.
Of course, Apple will have to stop considering/reverse the rejection of Google Voice, or Google will have to deliver that killer web app version, before iPhone users benefit from that...
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.
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First
using Siphon (jailbreak app) as a voip app for my iphone, accepts gizmo5 credentials and with google voice forwarding to my gizmo number and Siphon running in the background, I can make and receive calls for free while on wifi without a hitch, works great!!
You're already jailbroken so why not on 3g too?
Google Talk does indeed not have access to PSTN. Neither does Google Mail or Google EARTH.
But Google VOICE does.
So TechCrunch has spoken the truth, but misinformed everyone all in the same sentence. Brilliant!
Why in the world would Google Mail or Google Earth link to the Public Switched Telephone Network...
And Google voice is not phone service - it negotiates the connection between endpoints.