Some 3,700 technology firms worldwide were acquired for nearly $219 billion during 2011, as spending to acquire tech companies increased 17 percent from the previous year, and a new study said that pace is likely to pick up in 2012.

The study, from 451 Research, said several multi-billion dollar deals like those from Hewlett Packard (NYSE: HPQ) Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) may have made the most news but pointed out that there were 3,687 more deals in 2011 for information technology, telecommunications and Internet companies--a 13 percent bump from 2010-- increasing M&A spending for the second year in a row, the most M&A activity since 2006.

"The fact that deal-makers managed to generate an increase in spending last year is remarkable given the turmoil that has shaken the financial markets since summer," said Brenon Daly, research director for M&A at 451 Research. Daly noted that just two of the 10 largest deals of 2011 came in the final four months of the year, when concerns about Europe's debt crisis reached their highest point.

The report found that U.S. buyers increased cash outlays for international targets substantially; spending on non-North American targets increased 48 percent year-over-year while the number of deals increased 28 percent.

Private equity firms, meanwhile, sat on the sidelines and did little to contribute to the spending increase. Their total outlays increased only seven percent from the prior-year level, accounting for 14 percent of the past year's tech spending. 451 said that for the first time since 2008, there wasn't a single private equity transaction among the 10 largest deals of 2011.

Among the significant transactions of 2011:

• Google paid $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility.
• SAP spent $3.65 billion to acquire human capital management software vendor SuccessFactors.
• Hewlett-Packard paid a startlingly high premium, $11.7 billion, for British information management vendor Autonomy.
• Texas Instruments paid $6.5 billion for National Instruments, the largest semiconductor deal yet by a strategic buyer.
• Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for Skype.
• And a tech consortium purchased Nortel patents for $4.5 billion.

For more:
- see this release

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The roll out of Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Apps by the Los Angeles Police Department has hit some bumps as the PD raises concerns about Google not addressing security issues it had with the email system.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the Apps software has faced more than two months worth of concerns about security and delays in installing the platform, which beat out competitor Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) for a deal with the city two years ago.

Google Apps offers businesses and governments cloud-based email and document and video sharing technologies. Governments see the platform as an opportunity to scale to meet demand more easily and as a major cost savings tool.

But the problems in L.A. are raising concerns that the suite may not be ready for use by large organizations. It has, however, been successfully deployed elsewhere; Wyoming, for example this summer adopted Google Apps for its 10,000 employees, and the federal General Services Administration said it took its 17,000 employees to Google Apps for Government in July, the culmination of a $6.7 million project.

Google sees the product as a big money maker.

For more:
- see this Wall Street Journal article

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Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is buying Motorola Mobility (NYSE: MMI) for $12.5 billion, the company announced today, saying the two companies had entered into a definitive agreement and that both boards already had approved the deal.

Motorola Mobility shareholders will get $40 per share, a 63 percent premium on the share's closing price Friday.

The acquisition of Motorola Mobility, already a dedicated Android partner, will help Google compete in the mobile computing market, Google CEO Larry Page said during a coference call this morning. He said the company will maintain Android as an open platform.

"Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open," he said. "We will run Motorola as a separate business. Many hardware partners have contributed to Android's success and we look forward to continuing to work with all of them to deliver outstanding user experiences."

Page called the two a "natural fit.

"Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers," he said.

Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, said the relationshp between the two companies has been a strong one.

"We committed to Android in 2008 and the results speak for themselves," he said during the call. "This transaction offers significant value for Motorola Mobility's stockholders and provides compelling new opportunities for our employees, customers, and partners around the world. We have shared a productive partnership with Google to advance the Android platform, and now through this combination we will be able to do even more to innovate and deliver outstanding mobility solutions across our mobile devices and home businesses."

Page also said the deal will help Google push innovation in the home devices and video solutions business, and also talked about how acquiring Motorola Mobility would strengthen its patent portfolio.

"We recently explained how companies including Microsoft and Apple are banding together in anti-competitive patent attacks on Android," Page said. "The U.S. Department of Justice had to intervene in the results of one recent patent auction to ‘protect competition and innovation in the open source software community' and it is currently looking into the results of the Nortel auction.

"Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google's patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies."

For more:
- see this release
- see this blog post
- see this Wall Street Journal article

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Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has extended its Google Voice calling plan and lowered the fees for international calls, as has Vonage (NYSE: VG), with its new iPhone "Time to Call" app that allows 15-minute calls to 100 countries for less than $5. And Skype?

The company, which makes a fair share of its cash from international calls, said it has no plans to lower its rates despite the competition.

"We've never said we'll be the cheapest," said Neil Stevens, Skype's vice president and general manager of products and marketing.

The company said it's seeing more calls placed via its one to three-month subscription plans, which cost $3 to $14 per month, and said its Skype Premium plan, which includes unlimited U.S. and Canada calls, are enough to hold onto customers.

"Google is certainly a competitor but it's not that different from the other competitors we've had over the years, such as telcos and cable companies," says Stevens.

For more:
- see this Forbes article

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CNet has a side-by-side comparison of Google VoIP and Skype plus a video of the match up. Article

Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) seemingly haphazard approach to software development and company acquisitions often has people wondering what exactly their goal is. Frost & Sullivan has been monitoring the latest moves and acquisitions from the Internet giant and they've come to the conclusion that it's only a matter of time before they are truly a unified communications and collaboration (UCC) player.

A new F&S research report titled, "Google's Enterprise Universe: Google Storms the Unified Communications and Collaboration Market," projects that Google will be the next big UCC competitor. Google's cloud-based Apps and business Gmail offerings are one start to their strategy, but it's acquisitions point to even more of a UCC play. Google has, over the last few years, acquired videoconferencing vendor Marratech, VoIP vendor GrandCentral and Skype competitor Gizmo5 to build up its Google Voice offering--which is believed to be launching as an enterprise solution soon.

Not too long ago FierceVoIP ran a piece on Google's UC rise as well. Similar title too: The rise of Google's enterprise empire. Feels good to be on the right track.

For more:
- read the article at Phone+

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One of the coolest promises of Google Voice and probably any future unified communication (UC) suite is the voice-to-text voicemail transcription feature. Probably the major reason other UC offerings do not employ this wiz-bang technology is that the software still leaves much to be desired.

PCWorld has an interesting investigative article into the world of Google Voice transcription with comparisons of actual messages to their robot-transcribed counterparts. The service grays-out words it is unsure of and tries hard to fill in blanks, but often the results are not helpful. As the user noted, the grayed out text was a good indication but so was the fact that a sentence was made of complete gibberish. The tester found that even when the same messages were left, the system transcribed them differently each time.

Sometimes, some semblance of meaning could be gleaned from the transcribed messages--like when the service caught the word barbecue, helping the writer realize he was being invited to one--but often it was necessary for the user to listen to their voicemails still.

The day when all our communications can be siphoned right into our Gmail are still out on the horizon somewhere.

For more:
- read the report

Related news:
Google Voice adds pseudo-mobile number portability
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Irwin Lazar over at Nemertes Research did an annual research benchmark polling 200 companies about the technology they use and found some interesting stats about cloud based services and Google specifically. For all our talk about Google's future enterprise play, it looks like it might take longer for the company to become a serious player in that respect.

The research firm found that about 50.2 percent of companies polled had reservations about using Google as a vendor. Concerns ranged from storing data in the Google cloud, the suspicion that it might get indexed by a search engines, to the company's lack of a robust customer support arm.

Surely, Google's office-in-the-sky applications combined with Google Voice and the hints of the Google Voice softphone are compelling reasons to consider Google as a vendor, but the concerns of this poll surely offer some legitimate barriers for Google to overcome. Entrenched UC vendors have built up customer trust and can still charge them for it where Google might offer services for free with less safety.

For more:
- read the Network World article

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Google Voice: Now for everyone

No Jitter has a good round-up discussion of the lead up to the Google Voice launch. They were wondering what Google's next moves would be. Check it out here.

The wait is over! Those of you who haven't been able to get a Google Voice account are in luck. Google has opened the gates and now the web-based Google Voice communications management platform is open to the public.

Google Voice offers a single phone number that can ring on all of a user's phones, voice mail that can be sent to email as sound or text as well as the ability to listen in to a caller's voice message while they are leaving it. The public release has some businesses excited to use the features, although at the moment it would mean adopting new Google Voice phone numbers.

The services was previously invite only like many of Google's test products. With its resent purchase of Gizmo5, we can only hope more VoIP-style features will be added as membership to the service grows.

For more:
- read Google's Voice blog
- see this Google Voice video intro to get started
- read about the business promise of the software

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Google Voice is now open to everyone. Here we have posted a video intro provided by Google.

A few weeks ago, Google launched an app that mobile phone users could take advantage of, but the problem was it was a mobile web app and not a native phone app. Some of the functionality that Google Voice users love like SMS notifications haven't been carried along to the mobile web app so other developers have stepped in to fill the void. Enter GVMax, a free web service that monitors your Google Voice account and notifies you when you receive a new SMS or voicemail.

The work around uses Google Voice's SMS-to-email functionality using it to send the forwards to GVMax's servers which are then rerouted to the various ways a user wishes to be notified. When you recieve a new voicemail or SMS, the GVMax system can send you an IM, an SMS, an email or even a message on your Twitter account. The service not only fills in a functionality gap, but it also replaces a more cumbersome hack some user were employing involving having the notifications forward to an always-on home computer running a desktop app that would then pass on the notifications to users' mobile phones.

For more:
- read this blog post

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Google just launched a new collaborative tool called Buzz that serves to challenge Twitter, Facebook and possibly...unified communications and collaboration tools? Perhaps, posits PCWorld writer Tony Bradley. With GMail's features including email, text chat, video and voice talk, and now collaboration with Buzz, the suite of tools could be seen as a challenge to UC offerings from big league players like Cisco and Microsoft.

Just a few days ago Google revealed that it would be launching an enterprise version of Google Voice through its Apps suite for businesses. Combine that offering with the mythic Google VoIP, the new collaborative features of Buzz, the virtually unlimited inbox of Gmail, and Google's video chat features and you have many of the same features of UC packages. Bradley's article points out that the main thing holding back Google's UC suite is the lack of international VoIP support, but I am sure with the acquisition of Gizmo5 those details should be worked out soon--perhaps with the launch of Google Voice for enterprises.

For more:
- read the article

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Ooma has announced new upgrades to their Ooma Telo service at CES this week. The new additions include Ooma Pure Voice, HD Voice, iPhone and iPod Touch calling, Bluetooth, Google Voice support and voicemail transcription.

Ooma Pure Voice insures that call quality is maintained even over congested home networks where family members are also streaming video or downloading large files. Google Voice users can now bring the Call Presentation, Listen In, and caller-ID features of Google Voice into with their Ooma system. Google Voice voicemail has also now been integrated. Interestingly, it seems the voicemail transcription is not just for Google Voice users as the release says all Ooma customers can use it.

For more:
- read the release

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In some ways, the story of Google getting into VoIP isn't quite finished. The moves the Internet company has made are intriguing, but we haven't seen their end product yet.

The roots of Google's VoIP play began in 2007 when it acquired Grand Central, a Unified Communicaitons (UC) company. When the acquisition was completed, Grand Central disappeared into Google and eventually re-emerged in March as Google Voice with the promise of offerings like transcripts of one's voicemail, and archive and search of all SMS text messages you send and receive, plus easy access to Goog-400 directory assistance and the ability to make low-priced international calls. FierceVoIP wasn't too excited about this development at the time.

In May, Google reserved one million phone numbers with Level 3 causing speculation that a public launch of its Google Voice service was imminent, but Google Voice Product Manager Craig Walker dispelled those rumors via Twitter. Finally in June, Google did open the service to the public by emailing people who had expressed interest and giving them invites. Right after that, Google launched Voice for mobile, starting with the Android platform and Blackberry. In July Google submitted its Google Voice app for the iPhone, but it was pulled from the iPhone App Store because Voice overlapped with a number of features already offered by the iPhone. This move turned heads and the FCC probed the app removal looking for anti-trust violations.

Meanwhile Google added pseudo-mobile number portability to forward cellphone voicemails to Voice. Google also got into some trouble for enabling a traffic-pumping workaround on Voice. Google Voice now has over 1.4M users and partners with Level 3 Communications, Global Crossing, Broadvox Communications, Bandwidth.com, Pac-West Telecomm, iBasis and Neustar. One of the biggest moves towards a becoming a real VoIP competitor came when Google bought Gizmo5 which was being looked at by Skype. The Internet VoIP provider competes with Skype with peer-to-peer and low-cost VoIP calls and would now allow Voice to place calls over the Internet and from mobile devices with SIP calling. Later it was announced that Gizmo5 was migrating user PSTN numbers to Voice and that Google was shutting down GrandCentral at the end of the year.

The final bit of news that may or not be true was the theory that Google would be launching a VoIP-based phone. Although the latest Google phone to surface looks like a regular wireless Android-based phone, there is still hope that a data-only Google Voice phone is in our future.

Google is getting everyone to rewrite their holiday wishlists this week with its leaks of what some claim are pictures of the new Google VoIP phone. Sure it looks kinda like the T-Mobile MyTouch I already have in my pocket, but that wont stop tech nerds from ranting about it, and I--dear readers--am one of those tech nerds. That said, this latest hubbub seems like hype and speculation to me.

The new Google phone that is currently being analyzed across the Internet is called the 'Nexus One' and is an HTC handset running on T-Mobile that was given out to Google employees to test out new features for Android over the holidays. The phone features an updated Android build with some 3D elements, more home screens.

Noticeably absent from the recent reports were mentions of the phone being a data VoIP-based calling phone. Most reports just discussed the phone working with GSM based carriers like T-Mobile, which to me means this isn't the same phone we were talking about a few weeks ago. In fact, it looks to me like just another HTC phone that will be launched on T-Mobile running Android. Don't worry folks, I still have hope that a Google VoIP phone is in our future--it just might not be under my Christmas tree until next year.

For more:
- see this photo
- read Engadget's exclusive first look
- read what the WSJ had to say
- read the CNN blog take
- and this blog post

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PCWorld has a nice introduction to what Google Voice actually is. They claim it's not the be-all end-all of telephone service, but maybe oneday? Article

VoIP Survivor muses about what happens when multiple technologies collide over at the ever growing Google VoIP empire. Blog

It will be the dawn of a new year for Google Voice users, as GrandCentral will be completely shut down by the last day of this year. Assimilation has already been completed, but the Google empire has yet to close down the old GrandCentral site.

In a note to GrandCentral users, Google asked that they download any old messages or contacts that they might have stored on the site in preparation for the imminent shutdown. Google has already transitioned GrandCentral users over to Google Voice, but up until now, users could still use the website to access old messages. Those messages will be lost at the end of the year unless these legacy users download them for safe keeping.

Last week rumors started to emerge about a new Google phone that would use data for VoIP-based voice calls. I guess it's about time to unify all their voice offerings under the correct brand names.

For more:
- read this blog post

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Whoops! According to BusinessWeek, Google accidentally revealed its user numbers in filings to U.S. regulators. Although later redacted from the documents, BusinessWeek was quick on the draw and managed to get ahold of the originals before the 'less informative' documents replaced those originally made available to the public.

According to the letter to regulators, GoogleVoice has 1.4 million users of its single web-based phone number and voicemail service. The service is used regularly by about half that figure. Prior to being acquired by Google, the service originally called GrandCentral had 'tens of thousands' of users. As these numbers grow, the service could become quite disruptive, at least in the consumer VoIP arena where users aren't as worried about security or QOS.

Another interesting tidbit from the Google letter was the list of various companies who make GoogleVoice happen. Level 3 Communications, Global Crossing, Broadvox Communications, Bandwidth.com, and Pac-West Telecomm are all involved. iBasis, an international voice carrier and wholesale provider, helps connect outbound international calls, while porting and carrier lookup services are provided by Neustar, a directory services provider.

Last week, Google revealed that it was no longer blocking huge swaths of numbers by denying access to certain telephone prefixes. GoogleVoice now uses a workaround by blocking only about 100 specific phone numbers on its much-anticipated Google Voice.

For more:
- read this article

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Google has announced a new feature for Google Voice that will allow customers to use their current mobile phone numbers to receive voicemails in their Google Voice inbox.

Before this new feature was available, users needed a special Google assigned phone number to receive voicemail to their Google inbox, but with this new offering, users enter a special code into their main mobile phones to have unanswered calls forwarded to their Google Voice inbox rather than their regular voicemail box. An upgrade from the traditional voice mail system, Google Voice sends voice mails to a users' email account, transcribes them and stores them indefinitely. Landline number portability is still not available.

For more:
- read this Reuters article
- read this Business Week article

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