According to their website, GrandCentral offers many features that complement the phone services. For example if a user has multiple phone numbers (e.g., home, work, cell), he can get one phone number that he can set to ring all, some, or none of his phones, based on who's calling. This way, your phone number is tied to user, and not on his location or job. The service also offers one central voice mailbox thanks to which a user can listen to his voicemails online or from any phone, forward them to anybody, add the caller to his address book, block a caller as spam, and a lot more.

The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but according to rumors the Mountain View company paid somewhere around $50 million.

"GrandCentral is an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web," said Google product manager Wesley Chan in a blog post on Monday. "We think GrandCentral's technology fits well into Google's efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users."

For the moment, GrandCentral is no longer accepting new users, but those interested in trying the service can sign up for an invitation to join the service once Google has GrandCentral running on Google infrastructure.

According to some media reports, Google may integrate the newly acquired technology into its GTalk service or even in GMail.