Release of Google Voice

Google Voice is a service that gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail that is easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more.

Google number - One number for all your calls and SMS
* Call screening - Announce and screen callers
* Listen in - Listen before taking a call
* Block calls - Keep unwanted callers at bay
* SMS - Send, receive, and store SMS
* Place calls - Call US numbers for free
* Taking calls - Answer on any of your phones
* Phone routing - Phones ring based on who calls
* Forwarding phones - Add phones and decide which ring



Google voicemail - Voicemail as easy as email, with transcripts

* Voicemail transcripts - Read what your voicemail says
* Listen to voicemail - Check online or from your phone
* Notifications - Receive voicemails via email or SMS
* Personalize greeting - Vary greetings by caller
* Share voicemail - Forward or download voicemails

Voice features - More cool things you can do with Google Voice

* Conference calling - Join people into a single call
* Call record - Record calls and store them online
* Call switch - Switch phones during a call
* Mobile site - View your inbox from your mobile
* GOOG-411 - Check directory assistance
* Manage groups - Set preferences by group


Google Voice is currently open only for GrandCentral users

Locate Your Friends using Google Latitude!

Google Latitude is now live, a new service from Google that allows you to locate you and your friends on Google Maps and share it with others (not available on iPhone yet, but its coming soon).


For now, you can explore it directly yourself via your mobile phone or from your computer. Instead you can also use this direct link to login, and then you’ll be prompted to install the gadget. I found that, as it claimed, the feature was unable able to detect my location automatically from my PC and I had to set it out manually.

Google’s features are pretty simple. Along with a person’s location, the person’s picture will show up on the map (if it’s being set during account creation). The service uses cell-phone tower triangulation, GPS or Wi-Fi to find your current location. As of now, it works on RIM’s Blackberrys, Symbian devices and Windows Mobile, and the T-Mobile G1. About iPhone it will be supported soon. The service goes live in the U.S. and 26 other countries.

Here is a quick video to make you understand about Google Latitude:

Link: Google Latitude

Google SMS Channels: Send SMS Text Messages to your Group for Free

This time, Google come up with a new and innovative service for mobile phone subscribes. After SMS based search, Google have recently announced the launch of Google SMS Channels, which is a platform to send group SMS free of cost. It can be called the improved version of existing group messaging services like SMSgupshup and Mytoday.

The service “lets you subscribe to news alerts, blog updates and other kinds of information like horoscopes, jokes, stocks or even cricket scores via SMS text messages,” adding that Google SMS Channels are “free both for content publishers as well as mobile phone users who subscribe to text updates via SMS.”
http://labs.google.co.in/smschannels/browse




features:
Unlike other group SMS providers, Google’s SMS channel does not add any advertisements on the message footer, so group publishers get full 160 character messages to post.
Compared to other group messaging providers, Google gets its message published faster and FREE.
Supports Blogger blogs, Google groups, Google Alerts, RSS feed URL and custom messages.
For subscriber point of view, option to set the maximum number of Incoming messages.

Google Adds Voice And Video Chat to Gmail

Watch out Skype (and Meebo and TokBox), Google is adding voice and video chat to Gmail today, all in one fell swoop. When you are having an instant message conversation with someone over Gtalk, a video and voice option will appear (after you download this plugin).

From the Google Blog:

Just click on the new “Video & more” menu in a Gmail chat window and select “Start video chat” or “Start voice chat.” You can switch to a full screen view or pop out the chat window and change the size and positioning as you wish. Of course, not everyone has a webcam, but even if you don’t, you can still have voice conversations alongside your email and regular chat

Bringing video chat into the Gmail page, just as it does with regular IM, is in step with Google’s efforts to connect its disparate services together in a more seamless fashion. It is also a better experience. If you use Gmail as your primary email, you always have it open. That means you don’t have to open up a separate application just to conduct an impromptu text, voice, or video chat (as you do with other IM clients). These are all just different modes of communication, available to you as appropriate. Life just got a lot harder for startups pushing point solutions around video chat.

The new feature was developed out of Google’s engineering group in Sweden, where it acquired e-meeting startup Marratech in April, 2007. Serge Lachapelle, the Swedish Google product manager in the video below, used to be the VP of product management at Marratech.