Over the last few weeks, Google Voice has finally begun send­ing out invites to the throngs of peo­ple who have signed up since the ser­vice stopped accept­ing new users in 2007, fol­low­ing its acqui­si­tion. But now that all of these peo­ple are begin­ning to expe­ri­ence the won­ders of Google Voice, they’re also run­ning into its biggest road­block: in order to be effec­tive, you need every­one to start call­ing your new num­ber. And that means you need to print new busi­ness cards. In recog­ni­tion of this fact, Google is giv­ing away 50,000 sets of 25 free Google Voice busi­ness cards, printed by iPrint. If you’ve got a Google Voice account, you can grab a set here.

The mul­ti­col­ored cards are def­i­nitely going to catch the eye of any­one you hand them to, and they also do a great job at high­light­ing the most impor­tant thing on the card: your new num­ber. And while you may not be too keen to have every­one start call­ing you rather than using Email (which is going to be one of the side effects), you can always take advan­tage of Google Voice’s auto­matic voice­mail transcription.

Of course, there’s a good chance that none of this will be nec­es­sary once Google Voice intro­duces num­ber porta­bil­ity, which would let you keep your cur­rent num­ber and trans­fer it to the ser­vice. We’ve pre­vi­ously con­firmed that a very small num­ber of peo­ple have already been able to port their num­bers over, and that Google hopes to roll it out later this year, though the logis­ti­cal hur­dles involved are huge.

Full story at Tech Crunch

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