Google Buys VoIP software Company Gizmo5

Google today announced the acquisition of Gizmo5, a company that provides Internet-based calling software for mobile phones and computers.

Google did not provide any specific features for now. The company said that Gizmo5's engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience. Current Gizmo5 users will still be able to use the service, though we will be suspending new signups for the time being, and existing users will no longer be able to sign up for a call-in number.

"We've acquired a number of small companies over the past five years, and the people and technology that have come to Google from other places have contributed in many ways, large and small, to all kinds of Google products. Since the GrandCentral team joined Google in 2007, they've done incredible things with Google's technology and resources to launch and improve Google Voice," Wesley Chan, Group Product Managers Google wrote in a blog.

Google is already offering the "Google Talk" VoIP software. However, Google Talk does not support calls to general subscriber phones, and the Gizmo5 software fills this gap.

A 2x Faster Web

Google also today provided details about the SPDY. Pronounced "SPeeDY", it is an early-stage research project that is part of Google's effort "to make the web faster."

SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.

Google started working on SPDY while exploring ways to optimize the way browsers and servers communicate. Today, web clients and servers speak HTTP. HTTP is an elegantly simple protocol that emerged as a web standard in 1996 after a series of experiments. HTTP has served the web incredibly well. We want to continue building on the web's tradition of experimentation and optimization, to further support the evolution of websites and browsers. So over the last few months, a few of us here at Google have been experimenting with new ways for web browsers and servers to speak to each other, resulting in a prototype web server and Google Chrome client with SPDY support.

So far Google has only tested SPDY in lab conditions, Mike Belshe, Software Engineer at Google wrote in a blog. "The initial results are very encouraging: when we download the top 25 websites over simulated home network connections, we see a significant improvement in performance - pages loaded up to 55% faster. There is still a lot of work we need to do to evaluate the performance of SPDY in real-world conditions. However, we believe that we have reached the stage where our small team could benefit from the active participation, feedback and assistance of the web community," he added.

Google invites everyone who would like to learn more and contribute to the experiment to review an early stage documentation, take a look at Google's current code and provide feedback.