Internet telephony company GrandCentral was down for several hours this morning. That wouldn't be so bad if GrandCentral's business model didn't depend on telling users to give out their GrandCentral phone numbers instead of their cellphone, work, home, and other numbers. GrandCentral, which is owned by Google, provides a single number that can ring through to each of your phones. And most of the time it works brilliantly.
But GrandCentral is still in beta. And while we've grown used to Google's beta products being more stable than many companies' final release products, we probably shouldn't be surprised when a beta product goes down. And this morning, a lot of people were probably worried about missing phone calls because of the outage.
The service was restored by noon, Pacific time. But the fact that a "power issue" at a single facility could knock out GrandCentral phone service across the country is going to make us think twice before giving out our GrandCentral phone number from now on. Hopefully one of the things Google will do before taking the beta label off of GrandCentral is build some redundancy into the system to avoid this sort of problem in the future.
Looking for an invite to Google's GrandCentral? The service has been in private beta since Google bought internet telephony company last year. While the private beta label hasn't exactly come off just yet, Google is making it a lot easier for anyone who wants a GrandCentral account to sign up for one.
Today Google posted a little note on Blogger Buzz letting users of the company's Blogger service know that they could sign up for GrandCentral accounts immediately. As far as we can tell, that link should work whether you have a Blogger account or not. But if it doesn't work for you, all you have to do is sign up for a Blogger account. They're free.
Once you have a GrandCentral account, you will be assigned a phone number that you can link with a number of real world phones. Whenever someone calls your GrandCentral number, the call can ring through to your work, home, or cellphones. You can listen to your voicemail from the web. Or you can set rules for how calls from various numbers will be treated.
What's the Blogger connection? You can also use GrandCentral's WebCall feature to add a "Call Me" button to your web page. Visitors can click the button, and GrandCentral will connect their cellphone to your number without ever showing them your phone number. You can either take the call or send all calls directly to voicemail which you can access from the web. You can even post voicemail messages to your blog using GrandCentral's embeddable audio player.
Startup Ribbit is preparing to launch in impressive looking internet telephony service in a few months. The company's Amphibian phone service provides a ton of features, but in a nutshell you could describe Amphibian as a cross between Google's GrandCentral and Skype with a few extra bits thrown in like an open developer platform and some social networking features.
Here's how it works. You can make calls from Ribbit.com or any website with an embedded Amphibian phone application. You will also be able to load up an Adobe AIR version of the software so you can make calls without firing up your web browser. You can see a list of received calls on the web, and you can see user profiles for missed or incoming calls if they're available.
But you can also link Amphibian to your other phone numbers of VoIP accounts. So if someone calls your home, work, or cellphone number or your Skype, MSN Messenger, or Google Talk account you can take the call using Amphibian.
Ribbit has also partnered with SimulScribe, a service that transcribes voicemail into text. This allows you to read or even search your voicemail. SimulScribe integration doesn't come free though. According to TechCrunch, Ribbit's business plan is to allow users to make PC to PC phone calls for free, but the company will charge a subscription fee for calls to telephones. Users who want to purchase additional services from third parties like SimulScribe will pay an additional fee, although we're sure some add-ons will be offered for free.
It's been about a year since Google acquired Wiki/page creation/collaboration/calendar/etc site JotSpot. And for most of that year, there's been a message at JotSpot.com saying that you can't sign up for a new account because Google is still integrating the service.
Blogger Andrew Miller reports that Google may be preparing to launch some new JotSpot-based services starting next year. Miller attended a presentation with Google's Scott Johnston, where Johnston outlined a bit of Google's strategy for integrating JotSpot tools with Google Apps.
First up, Google will launch Google Sites, an expanded version of Google Page Creator. The service will let businesses set up intranets, manage packages, and build custom sites.
Google is also beefing up its online office suite and has plans to let users edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations while offline using Google Gears. There will also be offline support for Google Calendar and Gmail. Google also plans to integrate GrandCentral, another recent purchase, with Google Apps.
All of the applications that having been coming out online are great and all, but what happens when we rely too heavily on them before they have standards set in place.
Users are left in an interesting place with Web2.0. We sometimes rely to heavily on applications that are still in beta test modes, and on applications that have yet to iron out many operational details. This is extremely evident with GrandCentral. GrandCentral, which is now Google owned, is a service that routes phone numbers to a desired line, whether it's a mobile or landline. The whole premise it to take the same phone number wherever you go. Poor Judi Sohn can't do that though. She was sent a note that informed her that her number would be changing. Their reasoning, beta testing is still going on, and they are in the process of evaluating different solutions and partners. Thus they have to replace her number with a new one that is hosted with a higher quality service provider.
Lesson learned. All of these new services are great, but try not and rely on them to heavily until they come out of beta.
What's GrandCentral? It's a service that lets you receive calls from all your phone numbers on a single phone. You can also combine all of your voice mailboxes into one simple account which you can access over the phone or on the web.
In announcing the acquisition, Google product manager Wesley Chan describes the technology as fitting well "into Google's efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users."
Does this mean GrandCentral's technology will be integrated with GTalk? It's not clear just yet, but we wouldn't rule it out. Google promises that service will be uninterrupted for existing customers while GrandCentral's technology is migrated over to Google's servers. In the meantime, Google says a limited number of beta invitations will be available for new customers.
GrandCentral's tag line is "one phone number for life." Basically, the service provides you with a single phone number that can be linked to every other phone in your life, including home, work, mobile, you name it.
When you get a call on your single number, you can pick up any phone to answer. All of your voicemail messages go into a single mailbox, which you can access from your phones, the web, or via email. You can even create spam folders for telemarketers.
A Google Acquisition could mean GrandCentral would be integrated into Gmail and/or GTalk. Imagine being able to check your voicemail through Gmail or make and receive phone calls in GTalk.
There's no confirmation of the deal from Google or GrandCentral yet, but GrandCentral did just update their webpage over the weekend if you want to read anything into that.
If you dread the evening onslaught of telemarketer calls as well as the monotone response of "please take me off your call list," (on a good day -- we can't print what we say on a bad day -- ), a much welcome and highly rated phone service is here to help. Grand Central puts you back in charge of all your phones, (work, home, mobile, etc.) as well as all those pesky phone messages.
First you simplify. Grand Central provides you with a phone number for life which links all of your existing phones and consolidates voicemail into one mailbox. When someone calls this number, you can pick up the call from any of your existing phones. All of your work, home, mobile voicemail goes into one mailbox which you can access from your phones, the internet or email.
Now, for the good part. You can send all the annoying telemarketing calls to a spam folder. B'bye! Even better, you can choose a setting called "not in service" which will play the detested and jarring three note alert, followed by, "we're sorry, the phone number you dialed is not in service." HaHa!
GrandCentral is another of a crop of new services that aim to improve your telephone experience through the power of the internet. What it does is give you a single phone number that, when dialed, rings all of your phones--cell, home, office--and connects the caller to whichever one you answer first. That's a nice little service on its own, but GrandCentral has some more interesting tricks up its sleeve. To begin with, you can set up rules for different callers, e.g. ring all of your phones if it's your wife, but only your office phone if it's a client, and send your mother-in-law straight to voicemail, and you can set custom MP3s to be played for different callers instead of a standard ring. Even more interesting is a feature called "ListenIn," which lets you send someone to voicemail and then listen to their message as they're recording it. You can also start recording a conversation at any time by pressing a key and switch phones in mid-call, e.g. hop from your office phone to your cell phone without skipping a beat. Voicemail storage is unlimited and you can receive your messages on the phone, via email, or on the web. And GrandCentral can block annoying callers and even claims to be able to identify callers even when they've blocked Caller ID. So, how much will all this cost you? Oddly enough, nothing. A free GrandCentral gets you all of the above with support for up to three phones, 100 minutes of incoming calls, 3 custom MP3s, and 30 days of voicemail storage. For $14.99 per month that becomes six phones, unlimited minutes, 100 MP3s, and eternal voicemail storage. Right now you can get a free 60-day trial of the premium service with no credit card required. When you sign up you get to choose your own phone number, though the area codes currently available are limited. Even though I only have one phone, I'm tempted to sign up for the other features.
GrandCentral
