Oportunidades en tiempos de crisis NYT

Opinion.

Why Bad Times Nurture New Inventions By The Editors. March 13, 2009, 6:51 pm

With consumer confidence plunging, the jobless rate rising and the gross domestic product falling at a rate second only to the decline seen in the 1982 recession, there's little hope of good economic news anytime soon. But some economists and historians point out that such fallow ground can make a fertile bed for seeds of innovation and invention. What kinds of businesses thrive in recessionary times? How do entrepreneurs get a running start in a recession?

1-The Upside of the Worst of Times Amar Bhidé. Is the Glaubinger professor of business at Columbia Business School and author of "The Venturesome Economy." The deck gets reshuffled in a recession as habits are re-examined and patterns of behavior are broken, perhaps to greater degree than when things are humming along at a steady state. And that's what creates business opportunities. With a downturn, overall incomes, consumer spending and capital expenditures fall, but not to the same degree for all individuals, products or businesses. A 3 percent drop in aggregate income doesn't mean that everyone's wages fall by 3 percent. Some will lose their entire paycheck, others will keep what they have and a fortunate few even get raises. Recessions don't stop new ventures — they may even help. The same is true with consumption: we may spend a lot less on new houses but a lot more on new Kindles and iPods. These changes can provide a powerful stimulus for entrepreneurship. About 20 years ago, I studied 100 founders of Inc. magazine's 1989 list of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the U.S. Virtually all of them had started between 1981-83 in the midst of an awful recession. But that didn't prevent those founders from starting a new venture — in fact, in many ways it may have helped. Several had lost their jobs, so they weren't risking steady employment — and they were able to hire employees who didn't have great job prospects on the cheap. Landlords offered leases without asking too many questions about credit histories. Suppliers were willing to wait to be paid. And even though the old economy and the rust belt was in a deep slump, the personal computer was taking off, and with it opportunities not only for new hardware and software makers but also for retailers, resellers and even magazine publishers. More than a third of the founders I studied had started computer-related businesses. What were the worst of times for the economy as a whole turned out to be one of the best times for resourceful and opportunistic entrepreneurs. 2-Wool Suits, Canned Goods and the P.C. Scott Reynolds Nelson,. Is a professor of history at the College of William and Mary, is the author of the forthcoming "Crash: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Panics." America's financial panics have often been the periods of its most interesting commercial and logistical innovations. Plummeting commodity prices combined with new observations about manufacturing or trade often suggest new solutions to old problems. Some of our most storied brands today were born in depressions a century or more ago. In 1815, Britain and her allies had just defeated Napoleon. With the demobilization of the British Navy, British wool manufacturers had thousands of pre-cut wool jackets on their hands. To rescue themselves from bankruptcy in the British Depression of 1815-1816 they started the biggest Navy surplus sale in the history of the world. In 1819, 1873 and the 1970s, new inventions helped pull parts of the nation out of depression. Thousands of pre-manufactured wool coats were sold at auction in New York City. A small firm called Brooks Brothers bought them up, added civilian buttons and sold them on Cherry Street at closeout prices. Wholesalers were outraged, arguing that these manufacturers, auctioneers, and cheap vendors offered goods below cost, and should be jailed. Rather than jailing them, New York City imposed flexible regulations on New York's auction houses. By 1818, $16 million worth of goods were sold by New York's 43 licensed auctioneers. The $305,000 in proceeds financed a state-supported canal to Lake Erie. America's Panic of 1819 came on the heels of the British Depression, but the Erie Canal made New York's fortune after it was completed in 1825. The Great Depression of 1873 saw banks around the world paralyzed, making loans to industries impossible. France, Prussia and Austria-Hungary responded to the crisis by imposing tariffs on cheap American grain. They neglected to impose tariffs on manufactured food: tins of beef, beef extract, fruits, and vegetables. That made it possible for half a dozen industrial canners, who had made fortunes during the Civil War providing canned goods to Union soldiers, to create national and international markets. The names fill our pantries today — Van Camp, Libby, Swift, Heinz, and Armour. They advertised heavily, and relied on federally supported railways to transport their food over long distances. These canned goods fed the British Navy, allowed the settlement of Argentina, Western Canada, and the Australian outback. And so the American manufactured food industry succeeded where most others failed in the 1870s. Two bankers tightly connected to the beef industry — the Lehman Brothers and Marcus Goldman — rode out the financial storm and prospered because they were not diversified, but clung to the Anglo-American cattle market. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 hammered the American Midwestern manufacturing belt that had flourished in the 1870s. During that time, federal investment in military research expanded rapidly. Military designers hoped to design control chips small and rugged enough to withstand the electromagnetic pulse generated by a nuclear weapon. Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in these high-speed integrated circuits. Sun Belt cities in central Florida, Texas, and Southern California became the most important centers for this research. By the early 1980s it became clear that these tiny chips could be used for miniaturizing dozens of small appliances: the personal computer, the Walkman, and the portable phone. The Sun Belt became the fastest-growing region in the nation. In 1819, 1873 and the 1970s, new products helped pull particular regions of the nation out of depression. New marketing and branding tactics and government support of new infrastructure helped make innovation possible.

Photo, left to right: Naum Kazhdan/The New York Times, Paul Sakuma/Associated Press. Personal computers and canned foods were some of the inventions nurtured in recessions past.

3-The Merits of Parsimony Rita Gunther McGrath, Is an associate professor of management at Columbia Business School, is the author of "Discovery Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity." With business as usual off the table in a recession, people become more open to new and efficient ways of doing things. And they're forced to show more entrepreneurial discipline — you have to expend imagination before spending money. Boom times can be fatal to entrepreneurial success. Tough times can make for good startups and boom times can sometimes be fatal to entrepreneurial success. We can all remember how young businesses that attracted too much capital blew it during the dot-com era. After that bust, the merits of parsimony and growing the business step by step were rediscovered, ushering in smarter startups. For instance, Michael Mountz, founder of the robot manufacturer Kiva Systems, got started in 2003 by leveraging the talent of his M.I.T. colleagues to build a prototype from off-the-shelf parts in 30 days. He was able to get just enough initial financing from private investors to demonstrate the concept and land his first customers. Since then, Kiva has enjoyed rapid growth in sales to big name clients like Staples and Zappos. Some services may also have an easier time finding an audience than when times are flush. Consider the eagerness with which many consumers are unplugging their expensive cable subscriptions and turning to innovative on-line entertainment offerings, like Hulu. By some accounts, Hulu is poised to generate $200 million in revenue and has attracted over 3 million viewers in only two years of operations. Some industry pundits claim it will surpass YouTube in revenue by next year. It wouldn't be surprising to look back on this period as the starting point for a new generation of entrepreneurs.

4-Board Games and Other Escapes Don Kelly, a former chief of staff for the United States Patent and Trademark Office, is a patent agent and a licensing professional. Inventors and innovative entrepreneurs should be smiling. That timeworn proverb about "an ill wind that blows no good" truly applies in an economic downturn. No doubt, in garages across the country, innovators are hard at work as opportunity bangs on the doors. Answering the call, however, will require them to step back and take a hard look at the current environment. Corporations are desperate for great ideas to boost their bottom lines, but they are most interested in products that can rapidly and inexpensively dovetail into their current manufacturing regimen. This is no time for major capital investment. Companies also want something that will sell easily within developed markets. There's no cash for huge ad campaigns. Consumers' needs and priorities have changed, as well. With ever-tightening household budgets, people are looking for cost-cutting innovations and affordable escapes or distractions from their own private depression. Inventors will note domestic trends toward Internet shopping, clever board games that supplant high-cost entertainment systems, inexpensive household comforts, new gadgets that enhance consumers' homes and automobiles — both of which will be with them for awhile. The majority of economy-altering and enduring innovations have emerged from the workbenches of small business entrepreneurs and independent inventors. They have proven their worth through good times and bad, and they'll do it again.

5-Sell What They Need Martin Lindstrom is the author of "Buyology: The Truth and Lies About Why We Buy." What do Lindt chocolate, the Rubik's Cube, French perfumes and a pair of Wellies have in common? They've all had increased profits during this recession. The number of products getting these results, however, is small and getting smaller by the day. These brands, which may weather the storm, offer some hints for start-up businesses. Two concepts apply. First don't ask consumers what they want; figure out what they need. (No one knew they wanted an airbag, but they knew they wanted safer cars.) In recessions, affordable, small luxuries, like chocolate and perfume, hold their own, as do cheap entertainments like movies. Second, practical features give consumers a reason to make a purchase. Wellington boots sell because they're useful — and have clever designs. Products that protect our assets and homes also do well, like anti-virus software. Shopping doesn't stop in recessions, but consumers need a reason beyond just impulse.

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Google Voice, todo un telefonazo

Google Voice, todo un telefonazo Por FRANCIS PISANI (SOITU.ES) Actualizado 12-03-2009 16:57 CET Google Voice, el servicio de telefonía por Internet (tan esperado) ya está disponible. Una pasada. Se trata de una integración, de gran alcance, de servicios de telefonía por Internet (VoIP o Voice over IP) con los servicios de telefonía clásicos. Todo apunta a que no tardará en aparecer otro Google Voice en Android, su plataforma de telefonía móvil. Entre sus utilidades, os cuento las más interesantes: Número de teléfono único Desde este número "real", asignado por Google, podemos gestionar el resto de nuestros números telefónicos, redirigiendo las llamadas al aparato que nos resulte más cómodo en cada momento o a todos a la vez. Como este número "real" es de acceso gratuito, lo lógico es tenerlo de por vida. Un filtro nos indica de quién proviene la llamada antes de cogerla o, si lo preferimos, la redirige a un buzón de voz. Gestión de mensajes de voz (voicemail) Esta facilidad tiene los servicios de transcripción automática de voz a texto y envío de mensajes de correo electrónico para avisarnos de la llamada. Todo gracias a un software que afina por si algo no va según lo programado. Teleconferencias gratuitas. Los participantes llaman a vuestro número, aceptáis la llamada y empieza el juego. Llamadas gratuitas Entre usuarios de cualquier número en Estados Unidos (y Canadá) y tarifas comparables a las de Skype para el extranjero (parecen más baratas en algunos casos). Gestión de SMS. Los mensajes que recibáis en vuestro número de Google Voice se pueden redirigir al móvil que queráis (o a varios) y guardarse indefinidamente. También se pueden estructurar en forma de conversaciones. Mensajes personalizados para los principales destinatarios Por ejemplo: (al jefe) "Estoy en una reunión con un cliente y en cuanto termine te devuelvo la llamada" u "Hola, mamá. No te puedo contestar porque ahora mismo estoy a punto de empezar a hacer los deberes con mis compañeros, pero no te preocupes, que todo bien". (Dominique Piotet, mi coautor, ha respondido a mis llamadas durante varios meses con respuestas como "estoy a punto de ponerme con mi nuevo capítulo" o "Buenos días, Francis. Ando con la promoción de nuestro fantástico libro". Mi socio y yo nos valemos de él desde 2006, puesto que se trata de un servicio lanzado originalmente por GrandCentral, empresa absorbida por Google en 2007 (lo podéis consultar en estos posts y sobre todo en la entrevista a Vincent Paquet, uno de sus fundadores). A Google le ha llevado dos años volver a hacer todo el sistema y añadirle algunas novedades especialmente apreciadas (como la gestión de SMS, por ejemplo). [De momento, el servicio sólo está disponible para los usuarios de Grand Central]. He aquí lo que dicen David Pogue, del New York Times, Leena Rao, de TechCrunch, Om Malik, de GigaOm y el comunicado oficial de Google, así como la lista de sus atributos.

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PBX Virtual de Google. (3)

Web2.0, Internet.

Google's Free Phone Manager Could Threaten a Variety of Services By MIGUEL HELFT Published: March 12, 2009

Google Voice is currently open only for GrandCentral users Learn More

SAN FRANCISCO — Google stepped up its attack on the telecommunications industry on Thursday with a free service called Google Voice that, if successful, could chip away at the revenue of companies big and small, like eBay, which owns Skype, telephone companies and a string of technology start-up firms. Google Voice is an expanded version of a service previously known as GrandCentral, a start-up that Google acquired 20 months ago. It is intended to simplify the way people handle phone calls, voice mail and text messages. The service will initially be made available only to existing GrandCentral subscribers; Google says the general public will be able to use it in the coming weeks. Google Voice allows users to route all their calls through a single number that can ring their home, work and mobile phones simultaneously. It also gives users a single and easy-to-manage voice mail system for multiple phone lines. And it lets users make calls, routed via the Internet, free in the United States and for a small fee internationally. Analysts singled out the Internet calling features as the aspect of the service that is potentially most disruptive to established companies. While inexpensive Internet calls have become commonplace, Google's potential to reach a mass audience could make a difference, some analysts said. "I would consider Google to have the potential to change the rules of the game because of their ability to bring all kinds of people into their new tools from their existing tools," said Phil Wolff, the editor of Skype Journal. But in Skype, the dominant player in Internet calling, Google will find a formidable competitor. The service, which is free when people call other Skype users and carries slight fees for calls to regular phones, has 400 million registered users and is adding 350,000 users a day, eBay said. The company is focused on enhancing the service's video and videoconferencing capabilities. "Skype is light years ahead in terms of video, simultaneous chat and voice, and the installed base is huge," said Ross Sandler, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. "I don't think they have anything to worry about." In a presentation to investors on Wednesday, Josh Silverman, Skype's president, said that "chat and voice will become table stakes" in Internet telephony. "People will make their choice of communication software based on who makes the richest video experience." EBay has acknowledged that Skype does not have synergies with other parts of eBay, signaling that it may try to sell the service in the months ahead. Internet calls work differently on Google Voice than on Skype. Rather than starting a call from a computer, a specialized phone or an application on a mobile device, Google Voice users call into their voice mail service from any phone. Once there, they can push a button to get a dial tone and call a different number. As such, the service is not set up to handle video calls, though Google offers simple video-chatting capabilities through Google Talk, its instant-messaging service. For international calls to landlines in a handful of major countries, Google Voice is marginally cheaper than Skype, while Google Voice calls to international mobile phones are as much as a third cheaper than Skype's. Vincent Paquet, a co-founder of GrandCentral and now a senior product manager at Google, said that fees from Internet calls would probably play an important role in subsidizing the free service, which for now will not carry advertisements. "We can generate enough revenue from international calling to support the service," he said, noting that Google Voice was now running on Google's servers and could operate at very low cost. Analysts said it was not clear how much domestic or international calling business Google Voice could take from telephone companies. Google, which makes software for cellphones, is already at odds with several telecommunications companies over policy issues and over who will control the quickly growing revenue generated by mobile Internet services and advertising. Some of Google Voice's other features, like voice mail transcription services, are offered for a fee by start-ups like Spinvox and PhoneTag. And conferencing capabilities are sold by some telecommunications providers, but they are also available free through some online services. Google Voice may raise more hackles with privacy advocates, and perhaps regulators, than it does with competitors. The service would allow Google, which already collects vast amounts of data about the behavior of Internet users, to gather information on their calling habits. "It raises two distinct problems," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "In the privacy world, it is increased profiling and tracking of users without safeguards. But the other problem is the growing consolidation of Internet-based services around one dominant company." Brad Stone contributed reporting.

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PBX Virtual de Google (2)

 

Web2.0, State of the Art.

One Number to Ring Them All By DAVID POGUE Published: March 11, 2009

Stuart Goldenberg

If Google search revolutionized the Web, and Gmail revolutionized free e-mail, then one thing's for sure: Google Voice, unveiled Thursday, will revolutionize telephones. It unifies your phone numbers, transcribes your voice mail, blocks telemarketers and elevates text messages to first-class communication citizens. And that's just the warm-up. Google Voice began life in 2005 as something called GrandCentral. It was, in its own way, revolutionary. It was intended to solve the headaches of having more than one phone number (home, work, cellphone and so on): Having to check multiple answering machines. Missing calls when people try to reach you on your cell when you're at home (or the other way around). Sending around e-mail at work that says, "On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I'll be on my cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home." And having to change phone numbers when you switched jobs or cities. GrandCentral's solution was to offer you a new, single, unified phone number, in an area code of your choice. Whenever somebody dialed your uni-number, all of your phones rang at once. No longer did people have to track you down by dialing multiple numbers; no matter where you were, your uni-number found you. And all voice mail messages landed in a single voice mail box, on the Web. (You could also dial in to hear them as usual.) On the Web, you could play back your messages or even download them as audio files to preserve for posterity. You could even ask to be notified of new voice mail by e-mail. But wait, there was more. Each time you answered a call, while the caller was still hearing "one ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingies," you heard a recording offering four ways to handle the call: "Press 1 to accept, 2 to send to voice mail, 3 to listen in on voice mail, or 4 to accept and record the call." If you pressed 3, the call went directly to voice mail, but you could listen in. If you felt that the caller deserved your immediate attention, you could press * to pick up and join the call. This subtle feature saved time, conserved cellular minutes and, in certain cases, avoided a great deal of interpersonal conflict. GrandCentral also let you record a different voice mail greeting for each person in your address book: "Hey, dollface, leave me a sweet nothing" for your love interest, "Hi, boss, I'm out making us both some money" for your employer. You could also specify which phones would ring when certain people called. (For the really annoying people in your life, you could even tell GrandCentral to answer with the classic, three-tone "The number you have dialed is no longer in service" message.) Also very cool: Any time during a call, you could press the * key to make all of your phones ring again, so that you could pick up on a different phone in midcall. If you were heading out the door, you could switch a landline call to your cellphone. GrandCentral also offered telemarketing spam filters, off-hour call blocking ("never ring my BlackBerry on weekends"), and a dizzying number of other functions. For people with complicated lives, GrandCentral was a breath of fresh air. It felt like a secret power that nobody else had. Then, in 2007, Google bought GrandCentral. It stopped accepting new members, ceased any visible work on it, and, apparently, forgot about it completely. The early adopters, several hundred thousand of them, were able to keep using GrandCentral's features. But as time went on, their hearts sank. In January, Salon.com summed it up in an editorial called, "Will the Last One to Leave GrandCentral Please Turn Out the Lights?" As it turns out, the joke was on them. Google was quietly working on GrandCentral all along. Starting Thursday, existing GrandCentral members can upgrade to Google Voice. In a few weeks, after debugging the system, Google will open the service to all. Google Voice starts with a clean, redesigned Web site that looks like an in-box, à la Gmail. It maintains all of those original GrandCentral features — but more important, introduces four game-changing new ones.

Related Google's Free Phone Manager Could Threaten a Variety of Services (March 12, 2009) Pogue's Posts The latest in technology from the Times's David Pogue. Go to Pogue's Posts

FREE VOICE MAIL TRANSCRIPTIONS From now on, you don't have to listen to your messages in order; you don't have to listen to them at all. In seconds, these recordings are converted into typed text. They show up as e-mail messages or text messages on your cellphone. This is huge. It means that you can search, sort, save, forward, copy and paste voice mail messages. No human effort is involved; it's all done with software. As a result, the transcriptions are rarely perfect. For one thing, Google's software doesn't seem to have discovered punctuation yet. ("ohh hi it's michelle i just wanted to let you know that i really had fun last night and it's really great to see you okay talk to you later bye bye.") There are errors, of course; it's hard enough for people to understand cellphone conversations, let alone computers. Cleverly enough, the Web site displays transcribed words more faintly (light gray) when it is less confident about the transcription. Fortunately, it generally nails numbers — phone numbers, arrival times, addresses. And the rest is accurate enough to convey the gist. Companies like PhoneTag, Callwave and Spinvox already transcribe voice mail, complete with punctuation. They're great, but they cost money. Google Voice is free. FREE CONFERENCE CALLING Never again will you pay for a conference call, or require a special dial-in number, or mess around with access codes. All you do is tell your friends to call your GrandCentral at the specified time — and boom, you can conference them in as they call you. No charge. DIRT-CHEAP INTERNATIONAL CALLS If you dial your own Google Voice number from one of your phones, you're offered an option to call overseas at rates even lower than Skype's (and much lower than your cellphone company's): 2 cents a minute to France or China, 3 cents to Chile or the Czech Republic. Sweet. TEXT MESSAGE ORGANIZATION Google Voice's last feature is its most profound. The old GrandCentral wasn't great with text messages sent to your uni-number. In fact, it ignored them. They just disappeared. Google Voice, however, does the right thing: it sends text messages to whichever cellphones you want — even multiple phones simultaneously. Even more important, it collects them in your Web in-box just like e-mail. You can file them, search them and, for the first time in cellphone history, keep them. They don't vanish forever once your cellphone gets full. You can also reply to them with a click, either with a call or another text; your back-and-forths appear online as a conversation. Google Voice eliminates some of the annoyances of its predecessor. You can, if you wish, turn off that "press 1, press 2" option, so when the phone rings, you can just pick it up and start talking. Google has also done some Googlish integration; for example, your Gmail and Google Voice address books are the same. Nitpicks? Sure. The service has vastly beefed up its selection of available uni-numbers, but there are still some area codes you can't get (212 is especially rare). As a side effect of Google Voice's ring-all-phones-at-once technology, you sometimes find fragments of Google Voice error recordings on the answering machines of the phones you didn't answer. (Solution: make your voice mail greeting at least 15 seconds long.) There's a learning curve to all of this, too. Still, you can't imagine how much the game changes when you have a single phone number, voice mail transcriptions and nondeleting text messages on every phone. Suddenly, your communications are not only unified, but they're unified everywhere at once — the cellphone, the Web and the e-mail program. And all of it free — even ad-free. There may be some fallout as a result; I'd hate to be a company that sells voice mail transcription or conferencing calling services right about now. But that's life, right? Every now and then, a little revolution is good for us. E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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PBX Virtual de Google. "Google Voice".

Say No to boxed software! The future of applications is online delivery and access. Software is passé. Webware is the new way to get things done.

March 11, 2009 9:00 PM PDT Google Voice: A push to rewire your phone service by Stephen Shankland

Google Voice's interface now fits in with other Google properties. (Credit: Google)

SAN FRANCISCO--Google plans to unveil a service called Google Voice on Thursday that indicates Google wants to do with your telephone communications what companies such as Yahoo have done with e-mail. Google Voice, the new version of the GrandCentral technology Google acquired in July 2007, has the potential to make the search giant a middleman in an important part of people's lives, telephone communications. With the service, people can pick a new phone number from Google Voice; when others call it, Google can ring all the actual phones a person uses and handle voice mail. The old version could let people centralize telephone services, screen their calls, and listen to voice mail over the Web. But the new version offers several significant new features, though. Google now uses its speech-to-text technology to transcribe voice mail, making it possible to search for particular words. Gmail's contacts now is used to instruct Google Voice how to treat various callers. And Google Voice now can send and receive SMS text messages and set up conference calls. Existing GrandCentral users should get the option to upgrade Thursday, and Google plans to offer it to the public after "a number of weeks," said Craig Walker, product manager of real-time communications and head of Google Voice. As interesting as the service itself, perhaps, is that Google plans to offer it at no cost. Google is in the midst of a profitability push, trying to wring more money from existing sites, adding advertisements to properties such as Google Maps, Finance, and News that previously lacked them, and canceling many projects such as Google Lively that didn't pass financial muster. With Google Voice, though, the company is showing more of its earlier, more patient approach. "Our goal is to be able to offer it to people for free," Walker said in an interview at Google's offices here. Asked what the revenue model is for Google Voice, he offered only an indirect answer: "Let's get a bunch of happy users engaged in Google properties and getting their voice mail through this. Google gets value out of having happy Google users." Money isn't completely absent from the picture. The company does charge for international calls, and it wouldn't rule out advertising in the future. GrandCentral has appeared largely dormant from the outside since the Google acquisition, leading some to spotlight it as an example of a promising technology that was squelched by an acquisition. But, Walker said, there was plenty of work going on behind the scenes. "In addition to innovation, there's been a process of getting migrated and integrating with the Google infrastructure," he said. One big possible difficulty for people could be the issue of changing phone numbers. People's phone numbers can form a piece of their identity, in particular with home phone numbers held for years and number portability making it possible for people to keep their mobile phone numbers even if they change carriers. Even leaving aside the issue of the hassle of changing phone numbers, sharing your Google Voice number means committing your telephony to Google's services. Another possible hitch is offering phone numbers that match where people actually live or work. Here, Google hopes to have things under control, though there were no numbers in the 415 area code for my test of the service. "Our goal is to offer numbers to virtually everyone who wants to sign up. There are a finite number of numbers in the U.S., but we haven't reached anywhere near depletion," Walker said. "We hope to have a pretty good footprint (for area code choices) so that people will have really good choices." Google Voice, hands on Overall, I found Google Voice to be potentially useful, with the most compelling option the imperfect but still very useful transcription. The first promise of Google Voice is to simplify your phone communications. You don't have to worry about which number to hand out to people, and if you're sitting with your cell phone next to you home or work phone, you can choose which to answer. If you have the "screen calls" option enabled, Google Voice will tell ask you if you want to accept the call or send the person to voice mail. (Google Voice asks first-time callers to identify themselves.) In practice, virtualizing your profusion of real-world phone numbers with one that redirects is handy. You can set various preferences--for example, calls from your family members get a custom answering message; calls from your parents don't ring your work number; and calls from your spouse are answered directly when you pick up the phone rather than run through the Google Voice options such as answering the call, sending it to voice mail, or listening in on the voice mail. But I thought Google Voice's most promising aspect is voice mail transcription. Today, voice mail is a something of black hole for me. It's a pain to check, and I just tell people to send me an e-mail if they get my voice mail. When I'm on the road or at home, I check my e-mail much more frequently than my voice mail. And e-mail means I have their contact information and a record that they contacted me, all in a handy form that shows up through search. Transcription brings some of these advantages to voice mail. Because Google Voice e-mails you the text as soon as it's ready, you can quickly scan it to see if it's important. That's a lot less obtrusive than calling your voice mail system in the middle of a meeting. Also, reading the text lets you quickly home in on the caller's phone number without having to wait through the whole message. On clever phones such as the Apple iPhone or T-Mobile G1, the phone number is highlighted in the e-mail so you can click it to call back, too. However, the text-to-speech conversion is imperfect, to say the least--for example, it thought "Steve and Mary" was "Steven Mary." And here's an amusing sample of one transcribed voice mail I left myself: "hey i'm just testing the grand central transcription service to see if it really can do a good tax to speech recognition and that they believe in bed that's little voicemail and a web page because what would not be exciting what time you get in bed a voicemail on the web page." The Web site uses bolder type for words it's more sure of, so you can make better guesses about Walker said it takes roughly 30 seconds to translate a 30-second voice mail, which is pretty good turnaround. My timing test of a rambling, 1:45 voice mail took just almost exactly twice that time to show up translated in my inbox, though the voice version was available over the Google Voice Web site almost immediately. Shallow Gmail integration You don't need a Gmail account to use Google Voice--any Google account will do--but if you have one, you can customize the system's behavior for existing groups or individuals. When a message from an unknown number arrives, you can save it with the caller's name through the Google Voice interface, and it will show up in your Gmail contacts, too. A "contacts" tab at Google Voice borrows heavily on the Gmail contacts tab. However, Google left me wanting deeper integration. Where are Gmail's filters and labels? Google Voice is a big step toward the long-promised utopia of unified communications, but instead it presents me with a new inbox to check. When I asked Walker whether Google Voice would be unified with Gmail more thoroughly, he wouldn't say, but indicated it's on Google's to-do list. "There are a host of things we're working on," Walker said. "We want to get the core telephony from GrandCentral to Google Voice, to get that ironed out first." Even where there is integration, for example with the Gmail contacts page, there are some shortcomings. For example, I have a Gmail mailing list for "family," and I doubt I'm not the only one. My wife is a member of the list, but Google Voice by default opted to use the settings for its "friends" category. Apparently the reason for the issue is that Google Voice is case-sensitive: it created its own "Family" group, with an uppercase F, that has no members in it. Changing my existing group to "Family" in Gmail merely created two groups with that name, so to work around the issue I copied all the "family" members to "Family." I deleted the original to avoid the messy annoyance of keeping the two identical groups synchronized. Tussling with carriers? Another interesting possibility, given Google's Internet expertise and Google Voice's Web-based interface, would be to offer direct calling using VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol). Google Voice already has the potential to shift some of the customer relationship and valuable services from phone service companies to Google, and offering VOIP service would increase that potential. Walker wouldn't comment that possibility, though he did point out that Google Voice can work with the Gizmo VoIP service. For the regular public switched telephone network, people still have to spend money with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Vodafone, and others. "The point was to allow your existing services to work better together," Walker said. "You have to come with your own underlying phones and services for it to work." Stephen Shankland covers Google, Yahoo, search, online advertising, portals, digital photography, and related subjects. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered servers, supercomputing, open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen.

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