Google News, Inside.

Through Google’s acquisition early last month, they are making huge strides to offer new and free service through GrandCentral.

Here is a small excerpt about what Google has to say about the project,

For homeless people and others in need, not having a stable phone number can be crippling: you need one to follow up on medical appointments, keep in touch with friends and loved ones, and hear back from prospective employers.

When we acquired GrandCentral Communications last month, we were pleased to embrace their Project CARE initiative, which provides a permanent local phone number and unlimited voicemail service to people who need a way to stay connected.

GrandCentral has been operating Project CARE (”Communications and Respect for Everybody”) since April 2006, and with the help of more than 20 community outreach partners has provided more than 5,000 phone numbers and served close to 100,000 voicemail messages to homeless and needy people in the Bay Area. Someone calling a number from Project CARE will have the same experience as someone calling a standard phone number, and voicemail messages can be stored as long as they’re needed.

This is great effort by Google to help reach out to the homeless and those in need.

It’s also starting to scare me though, that Google has so much control over the world’s information — even though that yes, it’s their mission statement. I’ll be looking out to see how this new program goes for them.