Ideas Emerging

Late last week, a friend sent me a beta invitation to GrandCentral, a company which promises to provide users with the last phone number they’ll ever need. Google just bought the service, and the rumor is they’re going to begin tying it into their other communications services (Gmail and Google Talk, for starters).

It works like this: When you log into GrandCentral for the first time, you pick a new phone number — right now they offer area codes from 47 different states — and then give the service the number for every other phone you currently operate. After that, you send your new GC number to anyone who might have a reason to call you and the fun begins.

You can import you contacts from any number of services (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo) and set up an online phonebook. You can categorize your contacts into groups and assign rules for each group (which calls ring which phones during what hours of the day; which contact gets which voicemail; which contact gets which personalized greeting). You can automatically screen calls for telemarketers and spammers, and you can tell GC to play an eerily official-sounding “This number has been disconnected” message to any number you want to block for good (ex-girlfriends come to mind).

GrandCentral also creates an online voicemail inbox for your GC number, and that is a revelation. It’s visual voicemail for all of us who can’t get an iPhone. You can play the calls in any order, download an MP3 of the messages for posterity, forward the message to a friend, reply to the call via email, or even embed a flash version of the call into a website.

I haven’t even begun to describe all the features here. You can decide to record a call in the middle of a conversation; you can get notified of voicemail via email; or let people call you from a web page without showing your number. You can listen in on a message as someone is leaving it or transfer a call from one phone line to the next mid-conversation. The fact that the company just got bought by Google probably means the features are just starting.

I’ve tried it out on a half-a-dozen calls, and given my number out to a couple people. The sound recording on the voicemails isn’t fantastic — which would make it tough to save things for the future. The service doesn’t work with international numbers yet. Even though you have a GC number, if you place calls with your physical phones, those numbers will be the ones that people see in their Caller ID. To make a call with the GC number, you have to use the web interface, and there is a cost associated with that (though not during the beta period). The need to keep everything free (or at least cheap) is pretty big here, at least if GrandCentral hopes the product will see a user base outside the business community. But given that the company was acquired by Google, I can’t really imagine that that high-priced subscriptions are going to be a part of the business model.

Overall, I’m in love with and intrigued by this service. The features are great. The online voicemail box is great. The ability to screen every call is great. And getting bought by Google means that longevity probably won’t be a problem at all — that number probably will be mine for the rest of my life.

I’m really excited about the possibility of a unified communications suite from Google. That’s an incredible thing to consider. Email, instant messaging, phone calls, and voicemail, all tied together and assembled in one space. By a company capable of building up the right kind of infrastructure to support the system and perfect willing to provide the entire service for free.

More broadly, I’m excited about the potential of what this all means. We’re really starting to get untied from place, and that’s what gets me charged about GrandCentral. I have a number from Chapel Hill, am living in DC, but can make calls from anywhere, on any phone line, using this number. I know that you’re thinking that cell phones already give us a big part of that, but they leave us at the mercy of phone companies — call plans, data plans, overage charges, proprietary systems. GrandCentral unties me from that, and if Google somehow decides to make this a true VOIP service, then I’m completely free from the system. Yet even if the future for this service isn’t as revolutionary as it could be, GrandCentral is definitely worth watching closely.

– mc