For the longest times, I have been frustrated for not being able to use my Google Voice number as my Skype outgoing ID. Not anymore, Google is no longer blocking Skype’s verification SMS and all is good with the world again.
To set you Google Voice as your Skype caller ID, you will need to navigate to “Caller ID” panel in your Skype’s Account portal.
Select your desire country and enter the number you would like to use as your Skype caller ID.
Once completed, Skype will send a verification code to your Google Voice number in the form of an SMS. Enter that code into the Skype’s verification page and your caller identification will be activated in 24 hours.
Last week at I/O, Google gave us an early look at Wave, a new form of communication and collaboration tool that is slated to be out later this year. They are aiming to redesign the way we communicate and collaborate by reinventing email for the present. It does so by bringing in tons of intuitive functionality (drag and drop, privacy, embed, real-time everything) and utilizing the latest technologies (HTML 5 via the Google Web Toolkit). Google Wave uses an open protocol and the project will be open sourced, so anyone can build their own Wave system and still remain interoperable. They will also be releasing an API for Wave soon that will allow developers to extend the functionality of Wave even further. This is truly a remarkable product and one that I really look forward to using. If you haven’t watch the demo (embed) already, it’s worth bookmark for later when you have time.
Update: If you really don’t have the time to sit through the 80 minute demo, Lifehacker.com has compiled eight 30-60 second clips that highlight the best parts of Google Wave.
Psystar, the Mac clone maker that is subject to a number of Apple violation has been actively advertising their Mac OSX offerings. I came across a number of their Google ads while surfing around MSIWind.net and TUAW. I guess they are really trying to get their name out there as an alternative to Apple systems.
Google has confirmed that they have now acquired Grand Central, a company that lets you keep one telephone number as you move from home to home or job to job. The cost of the acquisition have not been released, but it has is believe to be in the $50 million range. Google will be moving the service over to Google’s network. A limited number of invitations for GrandCentral beta accounts will still be available. All Current GrandCentral customers will continue to have uninterrupted access to the service.
Google has just launched a customized search service called Google Co-op. Google Co-op allows a user to create and launch a search engine thats centers around specific websites so that searches will return results from only that website.
Options users have with Google Co Op:
Pages to index
Prioritized content
Allow / deny contributors to the index
Look and feel of the search results page
The Major plus with Google Co Op is that it can be integrated with Google Ad Sense so that the user can share revenue with websites that are embed with the custom search engine on their site.
Google + Mac = Awesome. The day has finally come. Google has awesome products but there Mac support could be a lot better. I guess that’s what they envisioned with this new Mac blog: Better Google products and support for Macs. It took a while but Google, we Mac nerds need love too.
As of last night it has been confirmed that Goole has closed a deal to acquire YouTube. In their largest acquisition to date, Google drops $1.65 billion in an all stock transaction. YouTube’s 65 employees will remain with the company at YouTube’s San Bruno headquarters. Google hosted a conference call and webcast to discuss the deal. A recording of the call can be found here. Congrats to You Tube (one of my favorite site), Keep up the great work guys!
Google today launched new search engine and index of source code entiltled: Code Search. They claim that the new code search engine will be able to find almost any code that its crawler can find. It does seem that the Google index of source code is a lot broader than other code searching sites.It goes as far as indexing content on zip and tarball files on open source sites, now thats broad.
The thing you’ll notice with Google Code Search is that you can use regular expressions in the query field when searching, more ways to refine your search. On the code searches homepage users will find a cool overview with pointers on using the service.
I for one, I am not too impressed by this, but it works so no complaints.
Google Code has just launched and it’s an open source project hosting site that will rival SourceForge.net. This is in light of all the rant that consumers are having with SourceForge.net’s up time. The reliability of Google’s uptime will end that problem and prove to be the primary selling point. It’s Ajax based, and has a 100mb limit on per projects space. Other then that I dont know much about this new Google service. Check it out for Yourself and see what you think.
Google announces the release of Trends, an analysis tool that allows you to see how often specific search terms are being entered into the Google search engine. These queries are compared in a number of ways, from your average line and bar charts to more advance graphs. The only draw back is that it does not include blogs like Google Finance.
With that said, Serach engines impact how brands are precieved. As a marketer Google trends is a wonderful tool for me. It helps me analyze and understand how people are searching for brands and its competitors. Not to mention the PR measurements with its news volume tool and major events that explain the trends.
Google announces the release of 
