Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) continues to try owning as many communication channels as possible to its customers. After buying unified messaging company GrandCentral a few years ago, the largest internet search company is has morphed that service into "Google Voice." Google Voice lets you can place free phone calls to anywhere (from anywhere) in the U.S. where you have internet access.

I am a web Bedouin -- not the desert dwelling nomadic tribe -- but the new term for an online worker without a fixed office. At various times during the work day (which can be almost any time), I might be found in the local coffee shop, the city park, the library, or my screened-in porch.

The working world is becoming quite a friendly place for us Bedouins. With Wi-Fi, cellular technology, instant messaging and internet-based project management, I am as much in my office while at the pool as at home.

Two new services are making the Bedouin's work life even easier. One, GrandCentral, I wrote about earlier, before it was bought by Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). GrandCentral gives me one phone number to distribute to my working contacts. I can route a call placed to this number to any other phone of my choosing, as well as record any conversation on it.

MAJOR PAPERS:

• Bear Stearns Companies Inc (NYSE: BSC) will reinforce the risk controls in its money management unit following the meltdown of two of its internal hedge funds tied to subprime loans, reported the Wall Street Journal.
• According to the Wall Street Journal, Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between Nokia Corporation (NYSE: NOK) and Siemens AG (NYSE: SI), will invest about $100M in India over the next three years.
• Consumers are going to buy many more large liquid crystal display, or LCD, flat screen TVs than large plasma flat screen TVs, reported the Financial Times.

OTHER PAPERS:

• News Corporation (NYSE: NWS) has acquired two weekly newspapers in the Bronx, The Bronx Times and The Bronx Times Reporter, reported the New York Times.
• Google Inc (NADSAQ: GOOG) has announced the acquisition of start-up company GrandCentral Communications on its official blog website, Google.Blogspot.com.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) bought telephone number company Grand Central. The startup has a clever suite of features that allows a customer to have only one phone number. All calls to any other numbers that a person has are routed to the "master" phone.

The service seems clever enough. Many people have a cell, office, and home number. Working all calls through a common one seems to make some sense. But, in a day and age where phone devices store an almost unlimited set of phones numbers that can be easily accessed, the value of the service appears a bit thin.

The larger question is what Google wants with the company. As Google moves further into providing search services for handsets, can a phone number service actually help it? Or, is the accuracy of the search function, both of the internet and local information, the reason that consumers want to have "Google mobile"?

It may be that Google is a company with too much money and too many projects. That is certainly an observation that has been made before. If some of its new products and acquisitions don't work out, it hardly matters. A few will probably bear fruit, and that is enough. Grand Central would seem to be a long shot.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

How many phone numbers do you have? Too many? A rumor currently circulating has Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) shopping for an e-company, GrandCentral, that can help you with that problem.

GrandCentral is a very cool, free service, accessed via the internet, that provides you one phone number that consolidates all of your phone numbers and routes calls to the device of your choice. With this number, you can block nuisance callers, listen in on their messages as they leave them (sneaky, eh?), and receive e-mail or text message notification that you've received a message.

It can automatically route Grandma's calls to your home phone, client calls to your cell, and calls from your good-for-nothing nephew to your fax machine. It also provides a voice mail box that will store messages in perpetuity and allow you to post them to your blog. (That could provide some interesting listening.)

This app seems like a perfect fit for Google, with its cross-platform features. As a one-stop shop for telecommunications, it would integrate beautifully into Gmail and Google's version of Instant Messenger. And since the company has been cruising Silicon Valley looking for investors, the time seems ripe for such a deal.

If you are interested in signing up for a GrandCentral account, you might want to run the available numbers through Phonespell to find one that produces an easily-remembered word or word combination.

Technology is getting more and more complex, but at the same time, amazing technological benefits are available to us average Joes without too much fiddling around. That is what this column will be covering. Every Monday, right here at BloggingStocks.com, I'll feature an easy-to-use hack, gadget or service that really can make your life better. Geeks, technophiles and early adopters have plenty of other places to look for hot new technologies to try. Here you'll find technology for the rest of us.

Sometimes a cellphone's main function seems to be the ability to interrupt you anywhere, anytime. But there are a number of new technological innovations that can let you gain more control of the cellphone and a few neat tricks that may be useful to you.

From consolidating all your phone numbers and screening cellphone calls to setting up timed calls, you can really make your telecommunications work for you instead of against you with the list of services I'm going to share with you.