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Google this week said it’s preparing to launch new services for mobile users, offering free U.S. calls, unified text messages and voicemail across numbers and integrated speech-to-text and search functionality.

But the new only available to existing customers of GrandCentral Communications, a telecommunications firm Google bought in July 2007.

The Google Voice service will automatically transcribe your voicemail to text — though it can be shut off in the settings page of the service — and you can search through past voicemails as well as archived SMS messages.

“Users can access their voicemail and SMS messages by phone, e-mail, or the Web. From the Google Voice inbox, a user can search for a specific voicemail message or SMS message,” a Google spokesperson said.

While Google has long baked advertising into its core products — running ads in tandem with search queries and within services like Gmail — it’s still not clear whether Google Voice run ads alongside these transcripts or elsewhere in the new service.

“We don’t have specific plans to share at this time regarding advertising within Google Voice,” the spokesperson told InternetNews.com.

But industry analyst and consultant Greg Sterling speculated that Google may introduce advertising if it needs to help offset costs for the free calls and if the service becomes popular.

He also said the specter of advertising in the interface is what rankles privacy advocates.

“There are possibilities, though sometimes you expect Google to introduce ads at some point with a new service and they don’t,” he said. “But they could scan the content of voicemail transcripts and insert text ads.”

“I can envision a situation where the interface has ads ties into it, they could even be behaviorally targeted ads, based on their announcement yesterday, and this is what goes right at the heart of what privacy advocates are concerned about,” he said.

Sterling also raised the possibility of audio ads, given that Google recently shuttered its radio ad unit but didn’t scrap the infrastructure and said it would still look for distribution channels.

“Audio ads could be inserted, whether branded or contextually relevant, into voicemail,” Sterling said.

In terms of privacy issues, he said that Google is smart to take a wait-and-see approach before monetizing Google Voice, avoiding interference with the user experience until its widely adopted and politically prudent.

“The key is integration with other services like Gmail, that’s the appeal for the user is everything is all working together in a centralized way,” Sterling said. “But that’s also what raises concerns with privacy groups. The political part is Google doesn’t want to confirm fears of data mining.”

It’s too early to tell how Google Voice will impact the VoIP market in the long-term, and in particular how it will affect big players in the sector such as Skype.

The Google Voice news comes as eBay is betting on growing Skype well beyond its chief current focus as a PC-based voice chat and videoconferencing application, yesterday describing plans that could see Skype doubling revenue by 2011.

Meanwhile, though, Skype just last week began its own voicemail-to-text service using U.K.-based SpinVox, though it’s a paid offering.

Sterling said that Google’s competing release is impressive, and depending on how much the search leader promotes it, could have a big effect on the industry. On the other hand, initiatives such as Google Checkout, which was touted as a “PayPal Killer,” never gained wide adoption despite big marketing campaigns.

The launch comes just days after inventor Judah Klausner said he had settled a lawsuit with Google over Klausner’s patents covering “visual voicemail,” which gives users e-mail like controls for managing voicemail.

Klausner’s company had previously sued and settled with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), which includes visual voicemail in its iPhone.

Effective May 5, Google Checkout is moving to a tiered fee structure and is eliminating its AdWords discounts for sellers who use the search giant’s online payment processing system.

The new pricing effectively raises rates for most online merchants, and puts the online payment system more in line with PayPal’s rates.

The new rates will range from 1.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction for monthly sales of $100,000 or more, to 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction for monthly sales of less than $3,000. And, any transactions with buyers outside your home country will incur an additional 1 percent fee.

Currently, e-commerce site owners pay 2 percent plus 20 cents per transaction, with no monthly, setup, or payment gateway service fees.

Google also said it would discontinue the AdWords credit promotion that’s tied to Checkout. The way it works now, merchants who advertise with Google AdWords are eligible for free transaction processing for some or all of their Google Checkout sales each month. For every $1 spent on AdWords each month, merchants were allowed to process $10 in sales the following month for free through Google Checkout.

Google did say any AdWords transaction processing credits accrued during April 2009 will be applied towards transactions that occur on May 1 to 4, 2009, and Google Grants recipients will still be eligible for free donation processing until 2010.

When Google released Checkout in June 2006, there was speculation that it might overtake PayPal as the primary online payment processor, even though the two differ. Checkout provides another gateway for Google users to make credit card purchases online, while PayPal primarily acts as a replacement to using a credit card to complete an online transaction.

But Checkout never really became widely adopted in the marketplace, though some studies have shown it to be popular with males ages 18 to 34, and recently it’s being promoted for the mobile Android platform. Because Google never reveals the number of users who use Checkout, it’s hard to discern what impact the new pricing will have, and whether the change is due to its failure or success.

Regardless of numbers, it’s bound to be good news for PayPal, which now offers more merchant services for about the same cost, and just mapped out an agenda to double its revenue by 2011.

Google did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Google seems to be offering beta testing of a new AdWords budgeting feature called “Timeframe,” which allows users to choose between monthly and daily budgeting.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable says the beta testing has been confirmed, and points to a WebmasterWorld thread that includes a response from an official Google representative:

ppcbuyers: I noticed a new feature under Budget Options for “Timeframe”, but only see it available in one client account - anyone else?

AdWordsAdvisor (Google Rep): Sounds as if the one account has been made a part of a limited beta test, ppcbuyers. Not much I can add beyond that.

Google has a page up explaining monthly budgets and the differences between monthly and daily ones.

“With a daily budget, lower traffic days may mean that your ads receive fewer impressions and have some budget leftover. We don’t use this leftover budget, but we do attempt to compensate for the loss in traffic by serving impressions up to 20% over the daily budget on high traffic days. However, some high traffic days require budget flexibility beyond this amount,” says Google.

“With a monthly budget, we’ll adjust your budget automatically each day to meet traffic demand while still respecting your budget for the calendar month. For example, if your ads often receive less traffic on non-business days during a month, we’ll apply your unused budget to remaining business days to take traffic fluctuations into account.”

It is unclear how many people actually have access to the Timeframe feature so far. I would imagine that the feature will be quite welcome by advertisers nevertheless.

When he starts his new job as head of Microsoft’s online services on January 5, Qi Lu will have his hands full. Chances are, his pockets are a bit fuller too.

Microsoft announced Thursday it has hired Qi as president of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) online services group (OSG).

Until August he was Yahoo’s executive vice president of engineering for the search and advertising technology group.

Qi brings ten years of experience at Yahoo to the new gig, which should serve him well. He will be in charge of search and online advertising as well as the company’s online information and communications services and will report directly to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Much of the weight of Microsoft’s online aspirations will fall on his shoulders. “Qi will oversee all efforts in search, our online advertising platform, and all of our online information and communications services,” Ballmer told employees in an all company memo on Thursday afternoon, which InternetNews.com obtained.

That’s a tall order. But at least one analyst who watches the search sector thinks it was a smart move.

“They didn’t hire just anybody — they hired the guy who built Yahoo Search and he also built their monetization technology,” Charlene Li, industry analyst and founder of Altimeter Group, told InternetNews.com.

Qi’s departure from Yahoo last summer was only one of many executive resignations in the wake of first Microsoft’s failed bid to buy all or part of the company, followed by the demise of Yahoo’s advertising deal with Google under antitrust pressure.

No matter how talented and organized, however, it’s hard to conceive that a single hire will change Microsoft’s fortunes in the online space.

“I don’t think that one person can bring everything around,” Li said. “Microsoft is very far behind so there are some very big barriers to get around,” she added.

One of those barriers is its tiny market share.

According to figures from Web tracking firm Net Applications, on a global basis, Microsoft remains in a weak third place in search. MSN Search currently has a 3 percent market share while Live Search holds 1.56 percent. Combined, that 4.56 percent is still less than half (NASDAQ: YHOO) Yahoo’s search share at 10.47 percent – and miniscule compared to (NASDAQ: GOOG) Google’s 81.11 percent.

The company had hoped to solve some of that problem earlier with its original bid for all of Yahoo, and then with a second attempt, this time aimed at only buying Yahoo’s search business. Neither worked out.

While Microsoft executives say they have no further interest in buying the entire company, Ballmer told shareholders in November that he’s not closed to the idea of working out some kind of deal for Yahoo’s search business.

Among the senior Microsoft execs who will be reporting to Qi will be Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the Online Audience business and Satya Nadella, senior vice president of OSG research and development.

Meanwhile, Brian McAndrews, who was CEO of aQuantive and became senior vice president of Microsoft’s advertiser and publisher solutions group after the software giant bought it for $6 billion in 2007, will “transition” out of the company. All three were reportedly interested in Qi’s job.