I’ve been using GrandCentral, a free and full featured phone forwarding service for about a month and a half now. Basically they give you a number for free which you can then forward to multiple other phone numbers. So one number rings your office, house, and cell. Whichever you pick up first takes the call. If you don’t take the call, it is routed to your GrandCentral voicemail, with free unlimited storage, accessible via telephone, desktop browsers, and BlackBerry/PDA browsers. Other companies charge for this kind of “find-me” or “follow-me” call forwarding, as well as voicemail, but GrandCentral has been, up to this point, free of charge.
The service also incorporates a “Call Me” button which you can place on your website/blog, which essentially offers free long distance. (Visitors enter their number, hit call me, the system then calls you, the Grand Central user, and calls the user to connect the two of you.)
The best part of the service, in my opinion, is the call screening capability. Using this feature, you can screen all calls, screen calls from blocked/unknown caller ID, or screen specific numbers. When a call is screened, the caller hears a greeting asking them to record their name, then you receive a call with the option to either take the call or send the call to voicemail but continue listening. There is even an option to block suspected SPAM callers completely or send them to a SPAM voicemail folder.
So far, the features have remained the same, save for the ability to upload your own MP3 as a ringback tone. Not sure if that is a copyright concern or some other issue prompting that change. Also, the service has become an “invite-only” beta, whereas earlier you were able to simply sign up.
Terms of the deal are confidential, but I’ll assume the founders of GrandCentral are having a very Happy Fourth. Estimates value the deal in the $50 million range, which seems low to me for such a useful service. I’ll assume though, that at this point GrandCentral is far from profitable. Most speculation indicates that ultimately Google might be rolling GrandCentral into Gtalk. I don’t have a problem with that, but I hope they don’t eliminate too many of the now-free features.
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