July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Google had its first $50 billion year in 2012. But with its massive investments in mobile, someday it might make that much just on the little plastic and metal devices we carry in our pockets.

In fact, digital ad company WordStream has counted no fewer than 21 ways that Google is monetizing mobile, from good-old-fashioned Google AdWords to Groupon-light Offers to augmented reality assistant Google Goggles and, someday, Google Glass.

Google even wants to replace your dead-cow wallet with a shiny digital one. But if you won’t buy what you want with Google Wallet, it hopes to at least guide you to your next purchase with Google Shopper.

Here’s the full list, in visual form, along with WordStream’s perception of how well Google is using its mobile tools to generate mobile money:

photo credit: Louish Pixel via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Google is giving its Gmail users a late Christmas present.

The company announced today that Gmail users in the U.S. and Canada will continue to be able to make free domestic phone calls through next year.  Google will also continue to offer international calls at “insanely low rates,” the company said.

Introduced in 2010, Gmail’s phone call functionality seemed a bit incongruous at first, but it’s quickly become one of the service’s best, most indispensable features. While Google initially announced that the free phone calls would only be offered for a single year, the company has extended the program at the end of every year since the program’s introduction.

Google’s angle here is clear: By offering Gmail users low-cost phone calls, Google can keep people away from rival services like Skype (and maybe glean a bunch of user information in the process). With that in mind, it’s strange that Google hasn’t announced that it will indefinitely offer the service. But, then again, maybe it likes the yearly fanfare that greets news of the program’s extension.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

If you’re a Google Voice user, today is not a good day to be sexting. The voice over IP calling service had a glitch this morning that associated incorrect phone numbers with outgoing text messages.

“Google Voice experienced an issue displaying the incorrect caller ID for outbound SMS. The issue should now be resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

People using SMS messaging ran into the problem earlier this morning when text messages were being sent with random numbers, as opposed to the person’s selected Google Voice number. The issue was spotted by The Verge when a number of people began complained the switch-up on Google Voice’s forums. Some on the forums explained that the problem spanned across operating systems, but didn’t affect calls.

To add to the confusion, however, the phone numbers changed with each text message, interrupting any conversation threads.

Google says the glitch has been fixed, but you should check each message throughout the day, just to make sure. You should also check to make sure you weren’t affected earlier in the day. Many businesses use Google Voice and if you missed the text message glitch, you might want to get in touch with your contacts to make sure there wasn’t any confusion.

Funny text message image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Sprint has launched an innovative new service that could replace long and hard-to-remember phone numbers with simple names.

The service is called StarStar Me, and plays off the unique * character on phones that activates special features via “star codes” such as *69 to return the most recent call. For StarStar Me, pressing the star key twice followed by a name will connect you to that person.

For example, you could dial **John, if I was a Sprint customer set up with the $3/month option, to instantly connect with me. And you can do it whether or not you’re on Sprint — callers can also be Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T subscribers.

StarStar Me is an innovative service and a step in the right direction.

Why, really, should any of us have to know, or even have to save into our mobile devices, a long, complex series of digits in order to connect to another individual? It’s an archaic holdover from the early days of telephony when telephone numbers were actually a code that related to your physical location on the grid.

Moving to a system where identity supersedes specific details of technology is a good thing.

It’s what Apple is doing with iMessage, tying multiple modes of connection (emails, phone number) to one person, and delivering a message regardless of which device it actually arrives on. Google has been doing something similar for years with Grand Central, now Google Voice, which ties all your phones together with one number so that, regardless of whether you are using your mobile phone, office phone, or a temporary SIM with a different number while traveling, friends and colleagues can contact you with one number.

Eventually, these models should take the next step, similar to Sprint’s StarStar Me service: remove the number and simply tie an identity (name, username, handle) to a variety of accounts: some cellular, some email, some other communication modalities. But an identity system cannot easily be federated between multiple islands of corporate groupings.

That’s one reason why Sprint’s StarStarMe will have a tough go.

StarStar Me is provided by a mobile marketing company called Zoove, the “exclusive provider of StarStar numbers for the largest wireless operators in the United States.” You can bet that mobile giants Apple and Google both want to own identity and are not going to support a relatively small mobile marketing company’s identity system. Not when Apple has iMessage and Google has Voice, as well as possibly an iMessage/BBM competitor.

Even though they are not carriers, they may have a better chance of succeeding because identity is more than a phone number, and StarStar Me — being carrier-centric — is oriented primarily around phone numbers.

More challenges include the fact that Sprint will be charging $3/month for the service, meaning that you can have a simple identity … but it’ll cost you $36/year. I think that’s a non-starter for most consumers, and that identity should be baked into the platform. In addition, the service is voice-centric, lacking an SMS story beyond being configurable to automatically send a text message to a caller when you’re busy, and not even touching email.

StarStar Me sounds great. Someone needs to bring our islands of identity together in a comprehensive, universal way … or provide a DNS-like identity service that connects them all.

I just don’t think it’s going to be StarStar Me.

photo credit: Adam Foster | Codefor via photopin cc

Hat tip: TechCrunch

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Teleconferencing is broken, and Craig Walker wants to be the man to change that.

Walker is the entrepreneur behind GrandCentral Communications (now Google Voice), Dialpad (now Yahoo Voice), the chief executive of product accelerator Firespotter Labs, and the first entrepreneur-in-residence at Google Ventures. (And he’s also an attorney!) Frankly, if his next venture were an Alpaca farm, he’d still be fighting off investors with a stick.

ÜberConference, the startup that claims to be “teleconferencing done right,” has already raised $18 million from Google Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Today, the free audio conferencing service has announced the public launch of its beta and its new premium service for business users. The startup, which will shortly be relocating to San Francisco, has been gathering steam with its beta product earning the top prize at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012.

“Our goal with ÜberConference from the get-go was to solve the biggest pain-points of conference calls,” Walker told me. Among them, that eight-digit long PIN, no frame of reference for who’s on the call, and a lack of recording capabilities.

On an ÜberConference with its cofounder, I could browse his LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, and Facebook profiles via the visual dashboard (it won’t take you to any external web pages), which provided background for those hard-hitting interview questions. It’s bit distracting, but it’s far better than having to frantically search for information about who’s on the call if you’re unprepared or there’s a less minute addition to the conference.

For Walker, the visual dashboard is the value proposition. “Audio-conferencing has been ignored features-wise for the last 30 years,” he said. The team is constantly updating the product — they recently had an idea for an “earmuffs” feature, which lets you click on participants’ featured photos to mute them, so you can enjoy a private chat.

The premium version, also launching today, is available for $10 per month. It includes:

• Access to local area codes: If you prefer to have a conference line with a local phone number, virtually every area code is supported.
• Increased conference size: Up to 40 participants can dial-in.
• Recurring conference calls: Ideal to schedule those weekly, bi-weekly or monthly calls.
• Outbound dialing: Simply pick up your phone to access the meeting. This removes the need for a dial-in altogether.
• …and a personal favorite: Customizable hold music! No more of those horrendous Kenny G-esque tunes. Also, because it’s awesome, check out Firespotter cofounder Alex Cornell’s “I’m on hold” song.
• Evernote integration: Also available on the free version.

With its premium product, ÜberConference is gearing up for an enterprise push. Similarly to companies like Dropbox, it’s hedging its bets on the “consumerization of the enterprise” trend. Rather than convincing IT to make the switch from legacy vendors, they’re hoping that employees will use ÜberConference in their personal and professional lives, which won’t go unnoticed by key decision-makers.

They’re also not ready yet for this kind of push as there is no enterprise-wide billing system. Going forward, however, ÜberConference is planning to expand marketing and sales team. No doubt, wide-spread enterprise adoption is a major part of how the company plans to make money in the long-term.

Walker told me that ÜberConference is well-positioned to conquer the space due to its “deep, close relationships with providers and carriers,” from his Google Voice days. He doesn’t view the legacy vendors as competition due to their high price. However, ÜberConference will increasingly be up against Microsoft Lync, Cisco’s Webex, and others, once it moves into the enterprise.

ÜberConference is currently available on the web, with a mobile version under development. Check out the video about the new features for the pro version, narrated to you in a posh-sounding, British accent.

Photo credit: Barnaby Kerr Photography

Google made a brief announcement today stating that Google Voice would be getting Google+ integration.

On the official Google Voice blog, we read that the two services will be linked by bringing information from your social Google+ circles into your Google Voice telephony account.

“To help make it even easier for you to organize your contacts, today we’re adding Google+ Circles to Google Voice,” writes Googler Tom Ford.

“Circles give you more control over how you manage your callers; for example, calls from your ‘Creepers’ circle can be sent straight to Voicemail, only your ‘College Buddies’ circle will hear you rap your voicemail greeting, or you can set your ‘Family’ circle to only ring your mobile phone.”

As Ford points out, it’s actually a highly useful integration with loads of use cases to make life easier for users of both Google-powered services.

Logged-in Google Voice users can now set up new groups, circles, and phone settings in the Groups and Circles tab on the Google Voice site.

This is just one more point in Google’s overarching plan to bring Google+ to every Google web app — or, more accurately, to unify many disparate logins and identities under a single, cohesive umbrella known as Google+. Concepts such as “circles” aren’t just for the social side of Google; they’re being included in every other relevant web app, as well.

In short, Google+ is becoming the “new mode of usage of Google” that its leaders envisioned.

“We have browsers, phones, self-driving cars, TVs,” said Google exec Bradley Horowitz in a recent VentureBeat interview. “In many ways, these products have grown up very autonomously and have veered off in different directions, and it’s clear that we can now rationalize them and make them coherent and accretive to each other.”

Image courtesy of S_L, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Google has released a feature-rich update to its popular Google Voice app for iOS, but unfortunately it also comes with numerous bugs.

The application catches-up the iOS app to where the Google Voice Android app was a month ago. The iOS app adds welcome features like group texting, multi-line text entry, one-touch copy and paste in the dialer and integration with Sprint phones. The Sprint integration is especially good because it lets the company’s new iPhone owners send calls to the native dialer.

But as great as those features are, the app has a few serious issues that need fixing. The biggest single issue being complained about is that when you call someone through Google Voice, it now shows your phone’s number on other people’s Caller ID rather than your GV number, as it previously did. I can confirm that this issue is legit, as I saw it in my own testing. Other issues reviewers have include the following: Sprint users no longer being able to make U.S. calls, one user said he could no longer make international calls, another said voice dictation no longer works and a few users said the app no longer works because they cannot log in.

Google was forced to pull its Gmail for iOS application in early November because of crippling bugs, and later released a working version of the app in mid-November. Coupled with these new Google Voice errors, this makes us wonder if the mobile app team has been shaken up lately. In the past, updates weren’t so consistently buggy.

At this point, I would highly recommend not updating your Google Voice application for iOS until these issues are resolved.

Update: A Google spokesperson has sent us the following (predictable) statement:

We’re investigating reports of bugs for some users on the latest Google Voice iOS app launched today. We believe we isolated the issue and are working on getting a fix for it shortly.

YouMail estimates that over 50 million people have interacted with a YouMail user and reached 15 million unique callers per month last October. To check who called you, you don’t have to dial your voicemail, enter a passcode, listen to a lady describe when the message was left and finally hear your message. The app provides the who, where and what all for free.

YouMail isn’t just for those who want to screen calls, but also those who want a richer voicemail experience. Features include voice-to-text translations, personalized greetings (Hi Jon, Mike isn’t here right now…), auto-blocked callers, and voicemail sharing.

YouMail plans to use the funding to expand its mobile offerings as well as its flagship service, the Visual Voicemail platform. Visual voicemail lets you see who has called and left a message as well as read a free computer-translated version of the message with voice-to-text. Oftentimes these messages are entertaining, but if you don’t want “BART card” to turn into “fart card”, you can sign up for a paid human translation service.

“Our call volume and the increasing number of third-party messaging applications demonstrate that YouMail is a proven communications-as-a-service platform unique in its ability to scale, to support ‘freemium’ economics, and to support agile mobile app development,” said YouMail chief executive, Alex Quilici.

The funding is probably in the $4-5 million range. Current round included, YouMail has raised four significant funding rounds. These include a $1.9M angel round from Tech Coast Angels, $4.75M first round led by VantagePoint Venture Partners, and $1.5M in debt funding. An extra $410K filed with the SEC, leaves roughly $3.9 to count for today’s announced round.

Tech Coast Angels and VantagePoint Venture Partners both participated in the current round.

Google Voice is YouMail’s biggest competitor.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive mobile trends at our fourth annual MobileBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the rise of 4G and how it delivers the promise of true mobile computing. We’re also accepting entries for our mobile startup competition at the show. MobileBeat is co-located with our GamesBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Google on Wednesday announced that users who want to keep a previous Google Voice number permanently will now have the option — for a small fee.

The feature is not a major new offering, but it could help a select number of users who want or need two different Voice numbers. Any user who changed their Google Voice number, ported their number to Google Voice, or merged their number with Sprint used to lose the old Google Voice number after 90 days. Now users have the option to keep the old number as long as they pay a one-time $20 fee.

Any person who calls or texts a newly permanent secondary number will automatically forward to the newer Google Voice number. To keep a previous number, log in to Google Voice, click the Settings tab, and click “make permanent” next to the number you want to keep.

It’s hard to believe there are many users clamoring to keep their older, secondary Google Voice lines. However, it could come in handy if you want, for instance, a business number and a personal number through Google Voice. Or perhaps you want to keep a number that’s easier for people to remember and would rather give that out to friends and associates instead.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Sprint subscribers who chose to integrate their service with a Google Voice phone number may discover a higher bill this month caused by overage fees.

The overage is due to a glitch in the integration process treats the Google Voice phone number as if it’s from an outside carrier, according to Google Voice Senior Product Manager Vincent Paquet, who posted the information on the official support forum.

Sprint customers who rely on free mobile-to-mobile minutes, such as family plans, will be hit hardest. A few long conversations between family members could result in eating up lots of anytime minutes for everyone on the plan — especially if more than one person is using the Google Voice phone number instead of their original Sprint number.

Customers who chose to use their original Sprint phone number as their Google Voice number won’t have this problem, but those who are seeing higher bills and want to switch back to their Sprint number may run into more problems than they fix.

As we reported days after Sprint launched the option to integrate with Google Voice, there is a plethora of  problems being reported by Sprint subscribers that include losing voice call functionality, security breaches and yes, overage charges. Based on customer discussions in the support forums on both the Sprint and Google side, it appears that the only customers affected are those who altered the phone number used for Google Voice.

So, for Sprint subscribers who bravely plan to integrating with Google Voice despite the large number of documented problems, using the Sprint phone number seems to be least problematic option.

Paquet, who was interviewed by CNET about Google Voice integration issues, indicates that most of the problemshave to be fixed on the Sprint side since Google doesn’t have access to investigate in many cases.

Paquet declined to comment on whether Google Voice integration would happen on other carriers. But, if AT&T or Verizon are in discussions to add the feature, hopefully they are taking notes to avoid the complications Sprint is experiencing.

[via ZDnet]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Google Voice, the search giant’s very useful Internet-calling application, has just removed one large reason some people hesitate to use it.

At least, on Sprint phones.

Google and Sprint said they will soon start offering (they didn’t specify a date) an option to let you use your Sprint mobile phone number as your Google Voice number. In other words, Google Voice no longer requires you to sign up for an extra number in order to use it. There are all kinds of reasons this makes Google Voice a no-brainer to use — if you’re a Sprint subscriber. To begin with, it will make it easier to save money while making international calls. And it replaces Sprint’s old-school voicemail with smart voicemail that forwards to your email and transcribes your messages. When it does launch, the feature will be gradually rolled out to customers.

As elegant as Google Voice is (I raved about it when it first came out, and still think it’s a must-have application), the one thing I feared might slow its adoption was that the need for an additional number. While not that much of a hassle, it was still enough to make people think twice. To use Google Voice, you’d have to enter the Google Voice online dashboard and choose where to route calls.

Starting today, if someone calls your Sprint phone number, you can set up Google Voice to have the call not only ring your Sprint phone, but also up to five other phones, including your home, office or other cell phones. All the existing Google Voice features otherwise remain the same: You can have the number ring different phones based on who is calling, and what time of day they are calling, and so on.

In addition, if you already have a Google Voice number, Sprint will let you replace the Sprint number issued with your new phone with your Google Voice number. If you make calls or text from that phone, everything is done through deep native integration with Google Voice. So Google Voice will replace your voicemail features — for example, letting you forward voice messages in the form of emails or texts. You can create custom greetings, and customize it for individual callers or groups of callers.

For people who make international calls, they don’t have to switch over to use another cheap phone service. Since the international call is routed through Google Voice, they get the low rates Google Voice offers. This gives Google Voice a leg up over competing services like Skype (it’s true that if you download the Skype application on smart phones, Skype allows itself to be selected as an option to call through — but even the extra step is a nuisance).

The service will also be supported on so-called “feature phones” — the basic phones that lack sophisticated Web browsers, modern app stores, and other distinguishing elements of smartphones like Apple’s iPhone and Google-powered Android models. For phones that don’t offer email, for example, it lets you do things like press “1” to connect to voice mail, and you can select to get a transcript via SMS.

The service can be used by the almost 50 million U.S. users of Sprint phones, though won’t be supported on Sprint corporate accounts or third-party services that rent out Sprint’s network for now.

The companies will demonstrate the new integration on stage at the CTIA conference in Orlando this week.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

TwoSixty Inc, an online phone management service backed by Y Combinator, announced today that it has launched TellFi.ca — a version of its virtual phone service specifically for Canada.

The phone service is a lot like Google Voice — it gives companies phone numbers that employees and customers can access and manage from anywhere. The company is focusing on keeping the quality of each phone call high in order to compete with voice-over-Internet programs like Skype and now Google’s internal calling service in Gmail — both of which are cheaper than TellFi on a per-call basis.

The service is geared toward companies rather than typical consumers, which Google has targeted with Google Voice. To that end, TellFi features conference call lines, extensions to other phone numbers and voicemail transcription. Companies can also forward their calls to other phones and schedule calls at a certain time.

“It’s a virtual phone system for someone who owns a cupcake store to someone who’s not very technical,” said co-founder Conor Lee. “Google Voice has a lot of great features, but it isn’t appropriate for businesses.”

Each company can get a phone number for free for a year as part of the promotion for the new Canadian push. That includes 100 free minutes per month, and it costs 6 cents per minute after that. There are two premium subscriptions, one for $24 a month and one for $70 a month. The better the subscription, the more minutes and phone numbers each company gets. The company has already picked up around 100 early subscribers in Canada.

TellFi decided to move into Canada after Grand Central, an early player in online phone management, dropped its numbers in Canada. That’s because Google bought Grand Central in 2007 and eventually remade the service into Google Voice.

The telephony company is also one of the first companies to be backed by angel investors Yuri Milner and Ron Conway’s new Start Fund. Each company in the winter 2011 Y Combinator class has the option to take a $150,000 investment from Milner and Conway, which caused a bit of a stink among angel investors who might lose the chance to invest in promising Y Combinator companies. Y Combinator typically invests between $15,000 and $20,000 in each company for the first several months. Garry Tan, founder of Posterous, is an adviser to TwoSixty.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Google is expanding its testing of a long-awaited feature for Google Voice, the ability to port your current mobile number to the service, Engadget reports.

Number porting on Google Voice has been talked about for years now, but Google tells Search Engine Land that it’s only recently gotten over some back-end technical hurdles that will make the porting process easier.

Porting your number costs $20, and it will also end your current cellular service plan — which means you may have to pay early termination fees if you’re still under contract. And since that leaves your phone without a cellular number of its own, you’ll have to call your carrier and arrange for a new number on your device.

The expanded testing, which will only go on for a limited amount of time, is a sign that Google is close to bringing the feature to all Google Voice users. The feature was previously available to some users but couldn’t take advantage of everything Google Voice had to offer. For example, you couldn’t use Google Voice’s nifty voicemail transcription feature after porting your number.

For some, the cost and headache of porting their numbers will be worthwhile. It effectively means you’ll never have to port your number again when you switch service providers — assuming you want to continue using Google Voice. Given how deeply the service is implemented in Android phones, you could easily rely on your Google Voice number more than your cellphone’s actual number. Google also recently released a native iPhone app for Google Voice.

As a Google Voice user, I honestly don’t think number porting is as useful as the ability to create vanity phone numbers. When first signing up, Google Voice lets you create your own customized phone number which can use any available area code and gives you the option of spelling out words. But given that Google is positioning Voice to be a complete replacement for your current phone plan, the addition of number porting will certainly be welcomed by users.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

It’s been a long haul for Google, but now iPhone owners can finally download an official Google Voice iPhone app – giving them access to even more Google Voice features than the current web app, although still not as many as Android users enjoy.

We reported in late September that Google was possibly working on the app, spurred on by Apple’s relaxed app development rules announced earlier that month.

Google had submitted a Google Voice app for inclusion in Apple’s App Store last year, but Apple rejected it. Apple later told the FCC that it was studying the app because it was concerned that it was duplicating the iPhone’s voice dialing functions. Google countered by telling the FCC that the app was rejected flat-out. Earlier this year, Google Voice finally found its way to the iPhone in the form of an HTML5 web application.

The HTML5 app was serviceable, but it couldn’t do things like send push notifications, access your iPhone contacts, or take advantage of the multitasking capabilities in the iPhone OS 4 update. The new app offers push notifications for new voicemail or text messages, as well a “direct access numbers” feature that lets users place calls faster than they could with the web app.

Of course, the app also offers standard features like the ability to send calls and text using your Google Voice number, and it lets you listen to voicemail and read voicemail transcription. In my brief testing, I found the app to feel much more polished than the web app. It offers some nice touches as well, like automatically highlighting transcribed voicemail text as it plays the message’s audio.

While it’s a significant upgrade for iPhone owners, the app still lags behind Google Voice’s ability to integrate into the core functionality of Android phones — like hooking directly into the phone’s dialer and native texting app. That will likely never happen on the iPhone, but at least we can be grateful to finally have a full-fledged Google Voice iPhone app.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

YouMail, a startup that provides next-generation voicemail services like visual voicemail, voice-to-text transcription, and custom greetings, announced today that it has reached a new milestone with 15 million unique monthly callers.

That number represents “five percent of the U.S population’s phone system,” the company says. The average YouMail user in the U.S. gets 50 or more calls that they can’t answer — a sign that users also trust the service to accurately deliver their messages. Altogether, YouMail users log more than 45 to 50 million hours of missed calls every month.

In addition to iPhone-like visual voicemail, YouMail users can also share voicemails with others, as well as choose to block specific callers. Premium services include human transcription for accurate voice-to-text, as well as “pro” accounts which offer more features than the standard YouMail acccount. The company offers free iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry apps, as well as a $399 app for Palm webOS phones. YouMail’s service works across all major carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint.

A service like YouMail is only bound to grow as users become more demanding of their voicemail features. Services like Google Voice already offer free call redirecting, transcription, and call recording, but not all of those features are available without getting a new phone number from Google.

Founded in 2007, YouMail is based in Aliso Viejo, Calif. The company previously landed $4.5 million in funding from VantagePoint Venture Partners, and it tells us it recently added $400,000 to a newer round. We’re awaiting details on the source of the new funds.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

A few weeks ago, third-party Google Voice apps for the iPhone started getting approved by Apple. Now it appears that we may soon see the official Google Voice app on the iPhone, sources tell TechCrunch.

Apple’s earlier refusal to approve the Google Voice app, which used the phone’s normal voice service for calls but integrated with its address book and other core features, proved contentious, sparking an outcry from app developers and government investigations in the U.S. and Europe.

A Google insider told TechCrunch, a technology news site, that the app is in fact already approved, and Google is hard at work updating the app for the iPhone 4 and the iPhone operating system’s multitasking functionality.

The news comes a few weeks after Apple relaxed restrictions on mobile app development and also published a set of App Store guidelines. Earlier this month, Wired.com sought a copy of Adobe’s complaint against Apple regarding its app conversion tool ban, but the Federal Trade Commission refused to hand over the documents — all but confirming that the FTC was actively investigating Apple.

Google had submitted a Google Voice app last summer, but Apple rejected it. Apple later told the FCC that it was studying the app because it was concerned that it was duplicating the iPhone’s voice dialing functions. Google countered by telling the FCC that the app was rejected flat-out. Earlier this year, Google Voice finally found its way to the iPhone in the form of an HTML5 web application.

But while the Web app was nice, a native Google Voice app will be able to do much more — including getting access to your iPhone’s contacts, and being able to take advantage of the iPhone’s multitasking capabilities. As TechCrunch mentions, it also opens the door for Google to allow push text-message and voicemail notifications.

Android users will still have the advantage of much deeper integration with Google Voice — the application can take over core dialing and messaging functions on that platform — but at least now iPhone users won’t be stuck in a web app ghetto.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at DiscoveryBeat 2010. Startups and big companies alike are encouraged to submit their discovery tactics to our Needle in the Haystack competition. Early bird discounts are available until September 22. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click here.

The other co-founder of Google Voice, Vincent Paquet, will take the helm and lead the Google Voice project after Walker’s departure, Google Ventures partner David Krane confirmed to VentureBeat.

“We’re thrilled that Craig Walker will be (Google Venture’s) first EiR — he’s precisely the kind of passionate, talented, and proven entrepreneur that we like to be engaged with,” Krane said in an e-mail. “We believe strongly in Craig and look forward to helping him develop his next start-up idea.”

Google acquired GrandCentral in 2007, meaning Walker has been with Google for about three years now. The service officially went live in 2009 with a fair bit of praise. Walker was formerly the CEO of Dial Pad communications, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2005.

Touchring is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

More than 500 million people use Facebook to communicate through text, pictures and videos. A startup called Touchring wants to add voice communication to that list, and is unveiling its service to the world today at the DEMO conference.

Touchring allows users to communicate by voice through any website. Users embed a Flash widget on a site. By clicking on the widget, site visitors call the user’s phone or computer. The service, now available worldwide, had previously been available only in South Korea. The startup is also launching Touchring Desktop, a new product that allows users to send and receive calls from a downloadable desktop client.

According to John Kwag, Touchring’s global team lead, embedding a Touchring widget is comparable to embedding a YouTube video on a site. Users can also post a link to Touchring on sites where Flash does not work. Calls between websites and desktops will be free, but Touchring plans to charge users for calls to mobile and landline phones. Touchring has also considered charging users for Touchring Biz, a product for businesses that it aims to launch early next year.

In April 2009, Touchring collaborated with Coca-Cola Korea on a calling widget. Using Touchring technology, more than 1 million users made phone calls and sent SMS messages from a Coke website. Touchring also partnered with Korea Telecom, a telecommunication provider, in October 2009 to create an iPhone app for its voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) service.

Like Skype and Google Voice, Touchring allows users to make phone calls from a computer, but Kwag compared these competitors to phone booths, saying they require users to seek them out. “Touchring is like your mobile phone,” he said. “We’re where you are instead of asking you to come to us.”

Founded in 2007, Touchring has raised $2 million in funding to date. IDG Ventures invested $1 million in 2009, while E& Networks, a South Korean firm, invested $1 million more earlier this year. Touchring is headquartered in Seoul, Korea, and has plans to open an office in California next year.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at DiscoveryBeat 2010. Startups and big companies alike should consider entering our Needle in the Haystack discovery business idea competition. Early bird discounts are available until September 15. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click on this link.

T-Mobile hopes to reignite some of the excitement from those early days by launching the T-Mobile G2 Android phone later this month. The company just took the wraps off the HTC-built cell phone, which uses the Android 2.2 software and a Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7230 microprocessor running at 800 megahertz. The device, pictured right, is reminiscent of the original G1 (pictured below), which also had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

It’s interesting to compare the G2 to the G1, to mark the progress of technology. This phone has a 3.7-inch touchscreen, which is likely much more responsive than the single-touch 3.2-inch touchscreen on the original. It has a 5-megapixel camera with a flash and 720 high-definition video recording, 4G connectivity using T-Mobile’s new HSPA+network2 (for faster data connection speeds), a Swype keyboard, and 4 gigabytes of internal memory with an 8 gigabyte microSD memory card.

T-Mobile humbly notes that it ignited the spark that set the Android world ablaze two years ago. Now, with the launch of the G2, the company is returning to its original partners Google and HTC to launch a true 4G phone, said Cole Brodman, chief technology and innovation officer at T-Mobile USA.

Andy Rubin, vice president of engineering at Google and the creator of the Android business, noted that there are now 80,000 Android apps, compared to just 50 at the launch two years ago. This new phone will be faster at loading web sites, running apps, playing videos, downloading files and more. It has seven customizable home screen panels, including a dedicated panel with one-click access to your favorite Google apps. The phone is tightly integrated with Google Voice (which transcribes voice mails to text)), Google Goggles (object recognition) and Voice Actions (which allows you to control your phone with your voice).

The phone will be available exclusively in the U.S. from T-Mobile in the coming weeks.

The feature is particularly attractive if you’re contacting someone in the US or Canada, because those calls are completely free. Google says it’s subsidizing those calls through its international rates, but those are pretty low too — you can call many countries for just two cents a minute.

The rapid adoption isn’t too surprising, since Google says there are hundreds of millions of Gmail users globally (although the feature is only available to US users for now), and a “significant percentage” of them already take advantage of the service’s video chat capabilities. So if you get a note in Gmail that you can place a free phone call, why wouldn’t you click and try it out? The only hurdle is that you have to install some software before it will work.

Which airports and libraries? Google said it’s still finalizing the deals, with the goal of installing the booths over the next few months. It sounds like the plan isn’t to make these booths ubiquitous, but rather to pick a few key locations. Passersby should be able to pop in and experience “dead simple free calling,” no account required — though Google is obviously hoping some of them will be convinced to create Google Voice accounts afterwards.

The company has promoted itself in airports before by offering free WiFi. Google revealed this latest effort at a press event in its San Francisco office, where it also announced the ability to make cheap calls within Gmail — and free calls to numbers in the United States and Canada.

Cnet first broke the news yesterday that Google was working on this feature. It was demonstrated this morning at a press event in Google’s San Francisco office. The interface seems pretty straightforward. After you’ve bought credits to pay for calls, you just hit the “call phone” button and Gmail places the call. Calls to numbers in the United States and Canada are free, and Google says international rates should be very low, too — to many countries it only costs 2 cents per minute.

This feature becomes even more useful if you have an account with the Google Voice phone service. Then when you make a call from Gmail, the recipient sees that it’s coming from your Google Voice number. You can also answer calls to your Google Voice account in Gmail.

Google is rolling this out to Gmail users in the US starting today. For now, it doesn’t work on the mobile phone version of Gmail or for businesses that use Gmail through the Google Apps program. (Though it sounds like this is something that will be added to Apps in some form in the future.)

As for how Google will make money, spokesmen said the revenue model revolves on international calling right now — that’s how they’re subsidizing calls to the US and Canada. (Google has only committed to keep those calls free until the end of the year, but it also says there are no plans to increase the rates.) Plus, this is a way to encourage people to sign up for Google Voice, which includes pay features.

Google declined to say how many people are currently using Google Voice (which opened to the public in June). Spokesmen did say there are hundreds of millions of active users in Gmail, and a “significant percentage” of them use the existing Gmail-to-Gmail video chatting service.

You can read more details on the Google blog.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

(Editor’s note: Shannon Suetos is a writer who specializes in business security systems. She submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

By now, we’ve all heard the phrase “there’s an app for that”. The problem is: There’s an app for virtually everything. Figuring out what’s truly useful for you can be an incredibly frustrating affair. 

You already know your smartphone can double as a virtual assistant. And if you’re shoestringing a startup or between funding rounds, using it in this capacity can be a great moneysaver. But first, you’ll need the right apps. Here are five that no entrepreneur should be without.

Google Voice – Need to keep your telecom costs down? Google Voice can help. This Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) program, like its slightly better-known competitor Skype, transfers conversations over the Internet instead of phone lines. It won’t eliminate your monthly bill to AT&T, of course, but it will ensure you don’t run over on your minutes.

Among the free app’s other benefits are:

• call forwarding from your personal phone number
• Voicemails can be rendered to text and sent to your email account
• Conference calling abilities
• Call blocking
• Anyone associated with your account can send and receive text messages for free

Scan2PDF Mobile – This is a lifesaver when you need a PDF file in a hurry.  This app allows you to scan a document and convert it to the popular Adobe format.  It’s currently available for iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile users and offers a free trial, but it will cost you $14.99 for the full version.

TextPlus – This app allows you to text up to 100 people at a time from your iPhone or iPad – and it’s completely free.  INC. Magazine recently named it one of the best apps for business.

Evernote – This app seems to make just about any app list these days—but it should.  It’s a good way to keep organized and allows you to take notes and pictures as well. Another potentially useful benefit of this free app is the ability to archive your tweets. For frequent travelers, this is a great way to keep everything organized and in one spot.

SurePayroll Mobile Payroll – Need some help crunching numbers? This app can calculate wages and deductions, manage payroll taxes, issue checks or direct deposit funds to your employees, provide 24/7 online access to files, send alerts, and provide labor law information. It can also be integrated with other payroll programs such as QuickBooks, Peachtree and MYOB.  The cost varies depending on the size of your company and your payroll needs.

VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall called Google Voice “a killer phone application” in his review of the service. After signing up, users are given a Google Voice phone number that’s intended to last for life. The number can reach any of your phones, and you have the ability to choose where individual callers go — be it your office phone, or straight to voicemail. Google Voice also solves the headache of voicemails by making them searchable, available online, and it even transcribes them for you automatically. Other features include email and SMS (text) notifications, call recording, and inexpensive international calling.

Last fall, Google added the ability to use the service with your existing phone number – although you have to sacrifice some key features like call screening if you do so. The company also developed a powerful web application for Google Voice that works with the iPhone and WebOS devices. A full-fledged Google Voice iPhone app was famously banned by Apple.

It’s a service that would be useful to anyone with a cellphone. As users move across various cellphone carriers and phones, their Google voice number and contacts (tied with their Gmail contacts) remain the same. Losing contacts during a messy cellphone upgrade will become a thing of the past. The amount of control that the service gives users is also unlike anything we’ve seen before.

As I’ve written previously, Google is quickly cornering an entirely new market with Google Voice, which is the result of its purchase of startup Grand Central in 2007. There are similar services available, like Ribbit and 3Jam, but Google still has the mobile advantage. That Voice is directly integrated into Google’s Android mobile operating system — which is growing in popularity quickly — is the real strength of the service and will make it difficult for anyone to compete with it directly.

To put things in perspective, Google has created a helpful infographic that shows how it thinks Voice fits into the history of communication technology:

The decision came after Google realized that college students currently on the service really appreciate its voicemail transcription features, as well as the ability to send free text messages. VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall called it “a killer phone application” in his review of the service.

Google’s decision to focus on college students is a smart one for several reasons. It’s a user group that’s generally on the cutting edge of technology trends. College students were among the first to use cellphones primarily, instead of landlines, for example. And more importantly for Google, their habits are good predictors for general users — particularly since they continue their tech habits after graduating.

College is also a great time to get users hooked on Google Voice. Unlike the phone numbers you get from typical phone carriers, your Google Voice number is intended to last you for life. As users move across various cellphone carriers and phones, their Google voice number and contacts (tied with their Gmail contacts) remain the same. With a service like Google Voice, students will always have access to their friends long after they graduate, and losing contacts during a messy cellphone upgrade will become a thing of the past.

Google is quickly cornering an entirely new market with Google Voice, which is the result of its purchase of startup Grand Central in 2007. There are similar services available, like Ribbit and 3Jam, but Google still has the mobile advantage. That Voice is directly integrated into Google’s Android mobile operating system — which is growing in popularity quickly — is the real strength of the service, and will make it difficult for anyone to compete with it directly.

Students can request a Google Voice invite via a special page with their .edu email address.

Google Voice finally made it onto the iPhone after a very long and unusually public dispute with Apple today.

Google did the runaround by making it a web app, not a native one in app store, as vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra hinted earlier this month. Instead of loading a proper app, a user will go to
http://m.google.com/voice
in their browser. It’s based on HTML5, which Safari now supports, and uses AppCache to let you use it without a network connection and local databases so you don’t lose data if you close the browser.

When Google originally submitted the app during the summer, it didn’t make it into the store. Apple maintained that it was studying Google Voice out of concern that it would duplicate the phone’s core dialing functionality, while Google told the FCC Apple had flat-out rejected it. The incident became another thorn in the increasingly difficult relationship between the two companies.

Google Voice makes calls free or very cheap for international dialing and provides transcriptions of your voicemail and free text messages, which challenges parts of the core revenue model for mobile operators.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Google’s vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said the Google Voice application, which is still in limbo after Apple declined to give it the greenlight for the app store, will come to the iPhone “one way or the other.” He made the statement while on-stage at the Crunchies award ceremony today.

Gundotra’s comment hints that Google Voice may not be a native app in Apple’s proper store, but rather a web version accessible through the browser. The two companies are at odds over what happened during the app store approval process. Apple says it “continues to study” the application and hasn’t approved it because it may “alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality,” according to a letter to the Federal Communications Commission. But Google has a completely different take on the story. It maintains that Apple did reject the app and that it did so because the app “duplicated the core dialer functionality”, according to parts of another unredacted FCC letter.

Gundotra’s full comments are below:

Michael Arrington: So what phone are you carrying?

Gundotra: Well, because of Google Voice, I have a dozen phones.

Arrington: Well, what do you have on you right now?

Gundotra: I carried a Nexus One today.

Arrington: So you were saying about the Droid?

Gundotra: I like the keyboard.

Arrington: Don’t you think this will hurt your relationship with partners who don’t get to make the official Google Phone?

Gundotra: I think some people are confused about our strategy. What we’re doing is going to consumers directly with the Nexus One as the first in a series. You’ll also see partners like Verizon and its Droid promoted. But there will always bee a flagship set of devices in a space where we make it easy for consumers to choose the best device and the best network.

Arrington: Will we see the next Nexus phone before the next iPhone? That gives you about five months.

Gundotra: We’re trying to innovate fast as possible. We aim to surprise people in 2010.

Arrington: What’s going on with Google Voice and the iPhone? Apple never said no.

Gundotra: Google Voice will come to the iPhone soon — one way or the other.

It’s just made things even easier, letting me send and receive texts by email. A plus: It also lets me save costs, by avoiding texting charges to my phone.

Here’s the background on why Google Voice has grabbed me: I can give out a single number and have people who dial it ring through to any phone I choose. And any voice message or text they send to that number gets recorded online, where I can view them any time I want. I just go to my Google Voice account, which I sometimes leave open on a tab on my browser. I can route voice messages to my email, where I can click and hear the audio, or simply see a transcription of the message. I wrote a positive review when Google Voice was first released.

Until today, you could get SMS messages from your phone, and you could see them in your account. But today, Google Voice lets you route the text messages to your email inbox. The messages arrive from an address at txt.voice.google.com (so, if you want to store them in a single place, you can create a filter for them within Gmail, for example).

And you can also see why carriers will be anxious about Google Voice. It lets you avoid texting charges (indeed, AT&T charges an arm and a leg for texting on the iPhone). You can do this by turning off SMS notification to your phone in Google Voice, and receiving and replying to your SMS by email.

The service also offers SMS threading: If you use Gmail, you also get the extra benefit of threading all SMS between you and one contact into one conversation, so it’s easy to see the whole discussion. This feature is turned on or off from the call settings page.

I’ve played with it and am sold. It adds free transcription to your voice messages on a tidy Web page, as well as SMS forwarding to your cell phone, and host of other goodies I’m convinced will make a lot of people run out and start using it. It’s free for national calls, and competitively priced for international calls. You can use it from your mobile phone (www.google.com/voice/m) — that’s right, free calls from your mobile phone. My favorite: a way to forward unwanted stalkers to a message that says your phone has disconnected.

To refresh your memory, Google acquired the service when it bought startup Grand Central in 2007. The service’s stated goal was to make your phone life as simple as possible. Core to that was to give you a single number. That number can then reach you everywhere, on all of your phones — with you controlling exactly who can reach you when and where. So you can give out that number, and have it directed to your home phone when you like, without ever giving out your home number. You can choose to have all your mother’s calls go through to your home line and ignore them at work. And you can have your wife’s calls go through to your work phone.

The service was already pretty useful — that is, if you didn’t mind adopting yet another phone number (the new number was the biggest trip-up for people; all of us already have a phone number, and most would rather not have to start giving out another). But Google Voice might convince you to make that step.

So far, the service has been limited to a “few hundred thousand users” — those lucky enough to have signed up with the service before it was closed in 2007 in order to ready it for mass usage.

I was one of those original users. However, after I signed up, it wasn’t quite useful enough for me to become a permanent convert. I’ve let the number languish. But co-founder Vincent Paquet showed me the latest upgrade yesterday, and it’s a no-brainer. I must have it! Why? Well, I’m tired of plowing through my voice messages and having no way to skip past ones I don’t care about. With my existing service, I also can’t skim through the messages easily to pinpoint that one relevant place where the person gives me their phone number so I can call them back.

Google’s dashboard provides the entire text of messages, and its search bar lets me search it all.

The new service will be rolled out to existing users tomorrow (Thursday). They’ll have to log into their existing Grand Central account and then follow directions for migration to the new service. New users will be allowed to access the service within the “next few weeks.”

The transcription is the best new feature. It transcribes every voice message into text and lists them on a page where you can read them all. The Google Voice dashboard page is integrated with your other Google apps and is accessible through your Gmail account, just like your other apps. You can choose a whole range of options in your settings: You can have the voice messages forwarded to your phone in the form of an SMS, so that you have everything on your mobile phone — you can click to listen to the original message or see the message transcribed. You can choose what exact hours a particular person can reach you at, say, your home number, and what hours they’re transferred to your cell, or directed immediately to voice mail.

The product falls into Google’s mission of organizing information. Project leader Paquet said Google realized voice is a big void in its search offerings. Lots of people like using their voice, especially when they’re driving. And they talk with their closest friends on the phone, making voice some of their most crucial personal communication. Paquet has been working on the product since 2007, with a growing team.

He says there’s a $1 trillion market for international calls, so Google has a way to make money from this too.

The service offers a host of other features:

– In the transcribed text, lighter font shows you where Google isn’t certain of the exact wording (see image above). Darker font shows where Google is more certain. I’ve blotted out the incoming numbers with red squares to protect the numbers of friends who tried this out.
– You can share your voice messages with other people, clicking to get code so that you can embed the messages on any Web page. You can download them if you want.
– You can report people as spam, so they won’t ring through to any phone (Google also tracks calls across its network, and when it notices that hundreds of thousands of calls are being made from a single origin number, it can choose to block that as spam).
– My favorite: You can send someone to a message that says, “We’re sorry, you’ve reached a number that is no longer connected.” The message is the same message you’re used to hearing when you call a bad number, so it’s quite convincing.
– It uses the same contact list in your existing Gmail account. You can import contacts from most other sources if you want.
– When using the SMS feature, if there’s a number listed in the message, you can click on it to make a call out.
– It allows conference calling from your phone for up to six people.
– The international rates are competitive with other services such as Skype. For example, it costs 2 cents per minute to call most European countries in the middle of the day, or 15 cents to reach a cell phone there. That compares to about $1.50 if you use your regular carrier to make such a cell phone call.
– It interfaces with other services that are open. So while it won’t let you accept calls from people using your Skype handle (because Skype’s protocol is proprietary), it does work with SIP-based services like Gizmo.
– It offers transparent billing information with things like the time of day you called, how long you called for, who you called, where and how much it cost.
– You can add notes to your messages.
– You can add personalized greetings for specific people.
– If you’re using an Android phone, incoming calls can pull up the picture of the person calling you.

The transcription, like other services, does have limitations. It works less well for people with heavy accents, for example, or for people speaking at a loud train station. Google’s service is one of the only ones on the market that is fully automated. Most other services rely in some way on human intervention to help with transcription — usually cheap workers in India.

This will not be one of those services axed due to lack of users.