Doug on IP Comm » Gizmo5

Google Gizmo5 deal is not THAT exciting

Doug Mohney — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:54:30 +0000

Last week, Google officially ‘fessed up to buying Gizmo5 for an “undisclosed amount.” Now everyone is falling all over themselves to spin this as the Greatest Thing since sliced bread. Excuse me, did everyone forget that it took Google a YEAR before it got its act together with Google Voice? Don’t expect this to be an earth-shattering kaboom for carriers for a bunch of reasons.

First, Gizmo5 has taken over $20 million in funding and reportedly was sold for a paltry $30 million. Gizmo5 has been shopping itself around for a while so it hasn’t made a ton of money. A lot of interesting SIP-based stuff sure, but not a ton of money. Can Gizmo5 scale? Probably. How long will it take? Probably not something that will happen overnight by any stretch of the imagination.

Secondly, Google will have to figure out how to integrate Google Voice and Gizmo5. Given all the time they spent futzing around with Google Voice, it’ll take them a couple of months to make a plan, and a bunch more months to integrate. By that time, Skype will have cleared out any lingering bad tastes over the extortion, er, IP property issues between it and its co-founders/current-owners and assuming there’s no other drama along that line… (Hmm, worth watching for).

Finally, free phone calls and ad-supported conference calls haven’t proved to be a successful (i.e. making money) business model to date, other than phone minute arbitrage which is going to end up going away sometime in the next three years because it drives both IP-based services and large carriers nuts.

Against this background, incumbent carriers — traditional phone and cable companies — aren’t going away. Landline sales have been declining for years and are at the point where they should start bottoming out. And a GV/Gizmo5 deal doesn’t really do a lot to bite into carriers making coin from “traditional” voice minutes and flat-rate data services.

Google Buys Gizmo…maybe?

Doug Mohney — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:12:33 +0000

According to TechCrunch, Google has shelled out around $30 million in cash to scoop up Gizmo5. Of course, the rumor mill last month had Gizmo5 being bought by Skype as a SIP backup plan if they couldn’t get JoltID and various other proprietary technologies secured.

The timing of this rumor/impending announcement is, shall we say, interesting at best because it comes on the Monday after Skype had indeed kissed and made up with its former owners and had secured all the code/intellectual property it needed to continue without a cloud of lawsuits.

Let’s think this through a little bit: Either A) For some reason, Gizmo5 and Skype weren’t really getting together, or the deal was contingent upon some bizarre clause that said “If we make up with Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, all bets are off”, B) Gizmo5 and Skype had a deal, but one or the other party got scared off by the evil lawsuits of Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, and/or C) Gizmo5 has shopped itself around to both Skype and Google, with the winner being the first guy that provides a check that clears.

If Google has purchased Gizmo5, it’ll likely take about a year or more for the company to figure out what to do with it, so there’s no need to start frothing at the mouth about this being a “Skype killer” by any sense of the imagination.

The Google Voice and Gizmo5 connection

Doug Mohney — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:52:03 +0000

Over at his blog, Andy Abramson is reporting that Gizmo5 is testing a way for its users to make free U.S. outbound calls using Google Voice from any SIP device.

GizmoVoice is the latest mashup service that Gizmo5 has pulled together, leveraging its pieces with other people’s pieces/services for relatively no/low cost. Users of GizmoVoice should be able to have “ANY” SIP device, be it a WiFi phone, ATA, SIP client, or even a PBX node, to make and receive (well, the make part is the key) U.S. calls without a monthly or per minute free.

But as that curmudgeon Jerry Pournelle said oh-so-long-ago, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch (TANSTAAFL), someone is making a buck off this somewhere; it’s just not clear where at this point. I suspect this is part of Mad Michael Robinson’s latest scheme to work the system to generate more minutes and more users.

Andy goes through all the permutations on how you can use Gizmo to receive Skype calls and pipe calls into GoogleVoice to get free voice mail, voicemail to email and free translation, plus a quick trick to make a call through an Apple iPhone to be IDed as a GoogleVoice number.

Skype can’t be that happy with these tricks. I really wish Skype would just suck it up and support SIP directly/natively out of its client, but if they did, it would break its walled garden concept too much and goodness knows where THAT would leave them.