GrandCentral, still groovy after all these calls...

It is month's later and I still love the GrandCentral phone service. I use my GrandCentral number as my main business number and try to get most people to call that number. The voice mail is fabulous. I can reply to voice mails via email if I choose, and when I am driving down the road, GrandCentral's voice mail acts as a central control, allowing me to return phone calls by pressing only the "2" key on my phone. When the return call completes I am back to my voice mail and can archive the message and move on to the next one. I also like being able to categorize my callers and have their calls routed to my home, cell, and VoIP phones accordingly. I upload my contacts to GrandCentral and assign them to groups, each of which has different priorities for their calls.

Today I thought about the virtues of GrandCentral as I read Mike Arrington's plight at TechCrunch. He found himself in a position today where an idiot attorney was threatening him on the phone. If Arrington had been using GrandCentral and someone had started bugging him, he could have taken that one phone number and marked it as spam, or simply told GrandCentral to start screening all calls from numbers he hadn't marked as contacts. Either way, he would have been only to assign those calls their proper priority with a click or two.

Mike, I'd recommend you go get your GrandCentral number today. Knowing you... you're going to need it.

Previous coverage of GrandCentral is here.

All your GrandCentral is belong to Google!

TechCrunch leaked it first, we passed it along and today GrandCentral makes it official. GrandCentral is now a Google property. I know I mentioned it in my previous post, but I think this needs it's own headline. Vincent says in the blog that for the foreseeable future they'll "work with Google to add capacity, work out any kinks, fix bugs, and add a ton more great features." He also mentions that they will continue to offer much of the service for free. It comes as a surprise, because I have been hoping for them to come out and say what the service will cost. I'd like to pay a bit just to get just a bit more control and a bit more response to my occasional technical issues. Also, I think that every once in a while, I'd like to talk to someone about the service. Is anyone listening?

By the way, if you'd like an invite to GrandCentral, which is now in private beta, drop me a line.

Update: first batch of invites sent. See comments.

Listen to the voice mail announcement from Craig and Vincent:

GrandCentral Phone Service Busted! Custom ringtones deleted.

I got bad news from GrandCentral, the ever so cool phone service, that is now a Google property:

Unfortunately we can’t allow the uploading of personal MP3s and any group or individual contact settings that were using one of these will be reset to the default American ring tone. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause.

The cool custom ringtones I uploaded will be deleted and replaced by the some standard, read that boring, ringtone. Why does RingCentral allow me to do this when GrandCentral does not?

Vonage fighting for it's life in Court...

Om Malik reminds us that Vonage is in court today. Vonage is fighting Verizon's patent infringement suit which would cost them $66 Million, 5.5% in future royalties, and very likely their company. I can't offer much on the merits of the case. I'll leave that to Om and others. What I can say, is that I have no reasone to kick the Vonage horse while it's down. I'll say it now, perhaps in eulogy, I've had a good experience with Vonage.

You may recall, that I heard strange noises on my Vonage line back in 2004. Admittedly, these were early days for my relationship with VoIP and it took a bit of getting used to. Vonage was pretty new back and they were working out some bugs. Just a few months later I was singing a different tune. In March of 2005 I still felt like an early adopter, but I felt like my risk had been rewarded. The service was (and is) working and I was saving some cash. I still feel the same way today. I don't know if I am a power user of Vonage's home service, but I do integrate it with my GrandCentral number, and I have purchased from them a remote phone number which makes me a local call for my family 500 miles away. It all works pretty well.

Like I said in Om's comment section... I’d sign up for Vonage again were it not for the it’s apparent and impending doom.

Another reason to use GrandCentral Phone Number Service

According to TechCrunch,

Google is in acquisition discussions with telephone management startup GrandCentral we’ve learned, and we have a high degree of confidence that the deal has actually been closed.

I am still a big fan of what GrandCentral can do to help me prioritize and schedule my phone interruptions. GrandCentral is an all-in-one telephone number that rings all of your phones at once (or none at all) depending on how you have configured it. Family calls ring my home phone, work phone, and cell phone simultaneously. Work calls don't ring at home unless I reconfigure them to. Calls from people I don't know, or haven't told GrandCentral about get screened and are treated as a work call until I decide how I'd like to handle the call in the future. I take and make a lot of phone calls most days, so having my phone number help by categorizing them first is a big help. It give me back some time, which I hope I'll use more profitably if I can use it in a planned manner.

If you're serious about increasing your productivity, then you have to be serious about scheduling and minimizing your interruptions. GrandCentral lets you create rules for answering your phone before someone calls so that your calls will be handled the way you want, when they call.

By the way, GrandCentral is also fun. They have made it ridiculously easy to create custom ringback tones for your callers. You can use one tone for all, use different tones by groups, or even upload tones for each individual caller. You can also record custom greetings by groups as well.

Back to the purchase by Google part of this story...

A purchase by Google makes sense. Plenty of benefits accrue to the Google applications suite with integrated messaging as an offering. Google seems to be gunning for Microsoft ona number of fronts. They've got docs, spreadsheets, e-mail, an RSS reader, IM, maps, recently acquired PowerPoint like presentation software and now a path to integrated messaging.

Grand Central launches mobile service

Just when you thought Grand Central's voice mail service couldn't get any more fabulous, they send out an email that says:

... we launched a mobile version of the service that is accessible for
everyone with a Blackberry, a Treo, a Windows Mobile device or any mobile device with Internet access. GC Mobile is located at http://m.grandcentral.com/ and gives you access to all the core features right from your mobile browser. Listen to voicemails, view contacts, change calls, and more.

It works just like they say -- You can listen to voice mails on your Blackberry (or other phone/PDA) as well as forward them to other users' email address. The browser based application is not just a repurposing of the standard website. They've optimized the site to make it as easy to use as possible on a PDA's small screen. It starts by opening up to just new voice mails and then lets you drive to the features from there. I have been using GrandCentral for several weeks and find myself using the service more as the weeks go by rather than less.

more to come...