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Every year communication seems to get easier. Well maybe not, but it should right? Being a tech geek, I am pretty well connected. I can be reached with: AIM, Yahoo IM, Jabber IM, Skype IM, home phone, cell phone, work phone, SkypeIn phone, and countless email addresses. While that sounds ridiculous to some of you, it’s not as unusual as you think. Applications like Trillian do a good job of combining chat services, but what do you do about phone numbers? Enter my new favorite startup, GrandCentral.

GrandCentral’s tag line is “One Number…For Life”. And that is exactly what you get. When you sign up for an account, you get to pick a traditional phone number. It seems they have expanding coverage based on their blog, and I had no problem getting a number in my local area code. You then record your voicemail message (this will also become your only voicemail btw) and even upload and MP3 for people to listen to as a ringtone when they call your phone. Next you will add entries for each of your current phones. For me, I have my home phone, my cell and SkypeIN which I use (primarily) via my Sony Mylo. That’s it for setup. It took me 10 minutes to do, most of which was searching for the proper ringtone.

Now have someone call your new GrandCentral number. Since this is the first time they are calling from that number, they will be asked to record their name. (And a contact in the address book is automatically created!) Then all of your specified phones will ring (preserving their caller ID). You can pick up any of your phones and will get a message stating: “You have a call from..”, and the person’s recorded name. You can press 1 to answer the call, or send the call to voicemail. One of the premium services available during the beta period allows to you to send them to voicemail, and listen as they leave their message. You can press a key to interrupt the message and jump into the conversation. Awesome - call screening has officially gone high tech.

So let’s say you decide to answer your home phone and 10 minutes into the call you need to leave the house. Normally you would have to call the person back from your cell. With GrandCentral, just tell the caller to hold, press *, and your other phones will ring. Pick up your cell and continue the conversation.

Your voicemail notification comes via email, and the web interface is awesome. After using the beta for 2 days I am sold. I will be a life long customer. When I am at work, I have no cell signal and have to go VoIP with SkypeIN. When I am in the car, no VoIP so cell is the communicator of choice. And when I am at home, incoming calls are free so I might as well pick that phone up. Until now, everyone would call my cell at all times. I can’t expect them to keep my 3 numbers and know when to call which. Thank you GrandCentral. You have really made my life easier.

A couple suggestions for GrandCentral to tackle: (UPDATED based on reading their FAQs)

• Scheduling Options - Right now, all I can find is a checkbox that stops my home phone from ringing from 8a to 6p. What if I don’t work those hours? What if I want my home phone to ring from 5-6a, then my cell and my SkypeIN from 6-7a, etc. I’d bet that a cool little GUI could be made for this.
• Voicemail Notification Options - There seems to be SMS and email notification options. Personally, I’d prefer IMs. I use IM constantly, and have multiple applications notify me of things via IM. I’d imagine others would appreciate IM notifications as well.
• SMS forwarding - I’d hate to have to give out “one phone number” that didn’t forward the SMSs to my IM, cell phone, and/or email. (UPDATE - “We’re not compatible with standard text message services (yet), but it’s definitely on our road map.”)
• Number of rings based on device - I have an answering machine at home and voicemail on my cell. I don’t want them picking up the “You have a call from” calls and recording them. I also don’t want to set them to pickup for 10 rings, as people will still call me on those numbers. If I could specify how many rings for each of my devices I could avoid this entirely. (UPDATE - While I wouldn’t consider this a solution but more of a workaround, GrandCentral says: “GrandCentral will disconnect a call from your forwarding numbers after it is answered if no action (pressing 1, 2, 3 or 4) has been taken within 15 seconds. Therefore, to prevent the GrandCentral message from being recorded by your cell (or other) voicemail systems, all you have to do is record a voicemail greeting that is at least 15 seconds in length, before the beep.”)

An Integrated service for anyone to tackle:

I don’t want another address book. I don’t want to export mine from outlook. I don’t want to import mine into Thunderbird. I don’t want Gmail to try and build one for me. I want one that is easy to use and compatible with multiple devices. Think del.icio.us style. Let my phone automatically pull my contacts down from the internet. Let my computer do that too. And let me provide account info so GrandCentral can do it. Let me right-click any email address and add it as a contact with a contextual menu. Same with a phone number. I now have one app for IM and one phone number. One address book please. I am willing to put work on this project if someone else is willing to be the primary. People will use this. Google do you hear me?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 8:22 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.