Grand Central - A single phone number for life for all your phones !
Posted by sambasiva on August 23, 2007
Yesterday, I received an invite to the public Beta of ‘Grand Central’ and promptly registered. I was pleasantly surprised by its features. (Grand Central has recently been bought by Google.)
Grand central (GC) enables you to register/pick a brand new phone number and then attach any/all of your phones (cell, home, office, etc) to that number. With this, when anyone calls your grand central number, one or more of your phones will start ringing (based on your settings).
There are lots of features apart from the basic / core feature that is mentioned above, but what stands out is the fact that you now NEVER EVER have to change your phone number as your actual physical phone numbers (cell/landline/VOIP) that are tied to specific service providers are shielded by your grand central number which you always own.
The other neat feature is that of a single voicemail box for all of your phones that are tied to the grand central number and the ability to manage those voicemails just like you manage e-mails.
What puts this service into high gear is its ability to direct calls that come to this GC phone number to exactly the phone you want on the fly based on who is calling. For example, you can direct all office calls to your office landline, friends and family to your cell phone etc.
The biggest hurdle that needs to be crossed by anybody using this service is the building of your contacts list and tagging them right (as a friend, family, office colleague etc). There are two ways to do this - do it yourself manually by importing from outlook, yahoo or hotmail or you let GC do it by having people who are not on your GC contact list identify themselves to the service before they are connected to you.
A missing link in this exciting new service is the ability to do a reverse masking i.e convert all of your calls from your different phones into the same single GC outgoing number. This avoids confusion at the calling party end as they expect to receive a call from you from the number they used to call you.
At this time, I am still debating on how best to start using this service starting from an empty contact list.
