Last week GrandCentral went live. You sign up for one phone number that you get to keep where ever you go and get to do lots of awesome things with that number. Similar to buying a domain name so that you have control over your email and web addresses.
Instead of trying to replace the existing ideas of a phone with Voice Over IP (VOIP), GrandCentral (GC) puts the VOIP service in front of the traditional phone services. This allows GC for ring all of your numbers to find you. There are other features that you’d expect like voicemail, call recording, call blocking, etc. All of these are managed via their website. I like the ability to group people and assign call forwarding based on the group. You can even send specific numbers directly to voicemail anytime they call.
This is going to sound silly, but I really like being able to access my voicemail on the web. Why can’t I do this for my home phone (from PacBell/SBC/AT&T/etc) or for my mobile phone (from Verizon)? Really, I’d expect the kind of tracking and history that GC provides online from both AT&T and Verizon. Their account management features are completely lame compared to GC.
For more info check out the Techcrunch post on GrandCentral. They bring up some good points, like how do I take my data with me if I want cancel service or go somewhere else? You can not take your GC number with you if you cancel service. GC is reported to already be working on adding fax support.
In addition to the fax support there is one other specific feature that I’d like to see added: better schedule support. Right now you can add a quick rule that will allow you to send all of your calls to voicemail or forward all calls to a temporary number. Beyond that the only other schedule like option is the ability to not have your home phone number ring Monday through Friday 8 am to 6 pm. That is and okay start, but I’d really like to put my daily schedule in there and customize the specific hours that each number should be used.
I can’t help but think that this company is going to get purchased by someone big. The service is already very cool and is oozing potential. If nothing else hopefully this will drive telcos to start seeing what is possible and offering comparable services.
Sometimes I forget things, I suppose we all do to some degree. I’ve come up with a few different techniques for reminding myself about things depending on the task/time/info. If someone mentions something at work at the end of the day sometimes I’ll leave a post it note on my monitor so that I’ll see it in the morning. Sarah does something similar at home, she’ll leave herself a note on the bathroom mirror before going to bed so she’ll see it in the morning.
A year or two ago I saw a friend of mine leave a reminder for himself by calling his work number and leaving a voicemail. I thought it was rather odd at the time, but since then I’ve done it a few times myself. What I find is that when I call work number (usually from my cell phone) and leave voicemail explaining what I’m supposed to remember, the mere act of leaving the voicemail tends to keep that info/task in my thoughts. As a result I usually end taking care of what ever it was that I needed to do before I even check my voicemail in the morning. So this idea of leaving reminders via voicemail seems to work, at least so far.
The next step from there is some sort of timed message reminder. I’ve done this before with alphanumeric pagers using QuickPage (qpage), which allows to schedule your alphanumeric page to be sent at a given date and time in the future. Many calendar systems do the same thing with email, reminding you of upcoming events. What I’d like to have schedule voice reminders.
I want to be able to call a number, leave a message and schedule when I want that message to call me (i.e. 4 Aug 2005 @ 4:15pm). I should also be able to tell it which phone number to call (cell, work, home, friend?) and optionally to try them all in a given order if no one answers, or if the voicemail or answering machine picks up instead of a person. On top of all that I should be able to optionally sync calendar items via some sort of text to voice via the same service. Perhaps with some email integration also?
I wonder if the mobile phone providers will jump on this idea. Heck, no reason the land line providers shouldn’t be able to jump on this. Anyone with a large capacity voicemail system should be able to add some extra smarts to implement at least some of these ideas.