Google Voice Founder Sets His Sights On VoIP Once Again

Is Google Voice (previously GrandCentral) co-founder Craig Walker getting back into the VoIP game? According to a recent tweet he sent out, it looks like Walker and his team at incubator Firespotter Labs is cooking up something in the VoIP space. As Walker writes, “Starting to play around with a bunch of VoIP ideas…time to take this incubator thing into hyperdrive:).”

For background, Walker co-founded GrandCentral, a phone management service that first launched in 2006 and was acquired by Google for $50+ million in 2007. Grand Central was relaunched as Google Voice.

Starting to play around with a bunch of VoIP ideas...time to take this incubator thing into hyperdrive:)

—
Craig Walker (@cwalker123) March 07, 2012

Walker left the Google Voice team in late 2010 to join Google Ventures as an EIR, and then founded Firespotter Labs. Walker has previously said that Firespotter Labs will build the initial products using its own permanent in-house team and if a product has legs, spin off the company to get outside funding.

To date, Firespotter has launched a few projects publicly—food photo-sharing app Nosh, spoof app Jotly, and waitlisting application for restaurants NoshList.

Walker clearly has plenty of experience in VoIP, with the creation of Grand Central as well the launch and development of Google Voice. Google Voice’s Gmail integration is done over VoIP, and as my former colleague Jason Kincaid reported, Google actually had a functional Google Voice VoIP app for Android that was developed but never released.

So is Walker developing Grand Central 2.0? Perhaps. There’s still room for improvement with Google Voice (perhaps adding additional VoIp support?), and VoIP technologies could also be complimentary to Firespotter’s NoshList application as well. We’ve contacted Walker for further details. Stay tuned.

Crunchbase

• FIRESPOTTER LABS

Company: Firespotter Labs

Website: firespotter.com

Launch Date: April 2011

Funding: $18M

Firespotter Labs is not a company. Of course we’ve got all the fancy papers and rolling office chairs to make it seem like a company, but at the end of the day we’re just a room full of crazy people dying to make an impact on people’s lives. None of us go to “work” anymore. Then what do we do here at the lab? We make things people like. Simple. If people don’t like what we make we throw it...

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