http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/201 ... ryone.html
I think this image says it best about what Google attempt to change. The vision can be pretty impressive and a game changer. To me, Nokia seems so lost when you put them beside AAPL and GOOG

Google has quietly (secretly, one might say) invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in social gaming behemoth Zynga, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The company has raised somewhere around half a billion dollars in venture capital in the last year alone, including $150 million from Softbank Capital last month and $180 million late last year from Digital Sky Technologies, Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. The Softbank announcement was never officially confirmed by the company, however, and the Google investment was likely part of that deal as well.
The investment part of the deal closed a month ago or so. A larger strategic partnership is still in process.
The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures, say our sources, and it’s a highly strategic deal. Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga’s games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see PayPal being replaced with Google Checkout as the primary payment option. Zynga is supposedly PayPal’s biggest single customer, and Google is always looking for ways to make Google Checkout relevant.
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It looks like Gmail users are already taking advantage of the cheap calling that Google launched yesterday. The company announced via Twitter that there were 1 million calls placed from Gmail in 24 hours.
The feature is particularly attractive if you’re contacting someone in the US or Canada, because those calls are completely free. Google says it’s subsidizing those calls through its international rates, but those are pretty low too — you can call many countries for just two cents a minute.
The rapid adoption isn’t too surprising, since Google says there are hundreds of millions of Gmail users globally (although the feature is only available to US users for now), and a “significant percentage†of them already take advantage of the service’s video chat capabilities. So if you get a note in Gmail that you can place a free phone call, why wouldn’t you click and try it out? The only hurdle is that you have to install some software before it will work.
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