Web based phone management service GrandCentral is launching here at DEMO and it’s one of the most interesting uses of VOIP I’ve seen yet. When you sign up for a GrandCentral VOIP number you can do all kinds of useful things with incoming calls and voice mail through the service’s web interface. Here’s a list of some of the features:
- Incoming phone calls ring on different phones according to which group you’ve placed a caller’s phone number in.
- You can play different voice mail greetings for friends, family and work calls.
- Voice mail is stored indefinitely.
- Voice mail can be listened to and replied to with just a few clicks.
- Voice mail messages can be listened to in real time and you can jump in to initiate a conversation in real time with one click.
- Telemarketers or others can be banished to the spam folder so if you’re called by the same number again your phone will simply not ring.
- You can click to have GrandCentral call both the person who left a message and your phone.
- You can record a section of any call with one button on the keypad of your phone.
- You can seamlessly switch from one of your phones to another.
A number of these features will really only be useful with repeat callers, but not all. I think that’s a pretty impressive feature set.
Accounts created now are free for 60 days (no credit card required) and will cost $25 for 1000 minutes or $15 per month for unlimited use. There will also be a free, 100 minute per month option indefinitely – though that may only be useful to tell people to call you back on your other number if you decide you don’t like GrandCentral. See below for more discussion of data portability.
GrandCentral was founded by Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet, both previously executives at Dialpad Communications, a VOIP service acquired by Yahoo! last year. The company has raised $4 million in funding from Minor Ventures. They fancy themselves to be anti-telco and that’s probably a great way to make friends. Similar services have been offered by other companies in the past, but GrandCentral believes their past success in VOIP combined with the relatively new ubiquity of broadband puts them in a good position.
All of this is well and good, but I asked the founders about a couple of other things readers might find of interest; the ability to leave the service and take your data with you and possible future directions they could explore.
Data portability. One number for life is a nice slogan, but if am going to put a lot of important information into my account at GrandCentral I want to know that I’m going to be able to get it out again. While cell phone numbers can now be ported from one carrier to another, the company told me it is not currently possible to take my VOIP number from them elsewhere if I cancel their service. Users can currently import phone numbers from Outlook or in CSV format and GrandCentral told me they are working on making it possible to export the phone numbers users have captured in the system back out again. I also think that batch export of MP3 voice mails with the metadata I’ve attached is a reasonable expectation.
If GrandCentral seeks to bring the best parts of the web to management of telephony, it would behoove them to include maximum openness and respect for users’ ownership of our own data on that list of qualities. They expressed a willingness to live up to those expectations.
Future directions. Users will soon be able to use GrandCentral to receive faxes as well as voice calls. The company is also looking into social networking type features for their site. We may see people sharing photos, videos and voice recordings on GrandCentral soon. The voice recording feature, by the way, does not alert both parties to a call that the conversation is being recorded. Most states in the US, the company told me, only require that one party consent to a call being recorded – the onus is on the GrandCentral user to obey their local laws. While it might be fun to check out a Digg type rating page for the funniest recorded voice clips from GrandCentral calls – this could also lead to some amount of backlash. There are any number of ways that a phone call can be surreptitiously recorded, but this one is particularly easy. Though some amount of mischievous fun could be lost, I think the company really should require that all parties to a call be notified of recording.
Overall, I think GrandCentral is a remarkably good product. I’ve got an account myself and look forward to using it. Other services that allow web management of voice mail can still ask for too much interaction with your phone, but putting VOIP in the middle is very smart.
aw, yuck. rss feed for techcrunch is clipped now.
Do you have the price right? $25 for 1000 minutes and $15 for unlimited?
What happened to the “Web Services” company that existed at this domain? I know Minor Ventures is Halsey Minor’s fund – but what happened, why the change?
I guess I’m glad we didn’t decide to build anything on the original Grand Central, the web services platform…
A web based development platform ala DabbleDB with a Wufoo+ front end for input forms and a Squarespace type ease of content management is so badly needed – too bad Grand Central abandoned this space.
why clip the feed? If you’re gonna put ads, leave the whole thing, no?
having enjoyed their entire featurelist via a personal asterisk server, its good to see them bringing it to the masses. customizing sip.conf/extensions.conf/voicemail.conf and SIP/UDP _srv entries is not for the faint of heart. there only 0.4 cents a minute more than im paying for the privelege of all this..
Larry,
The old Grandcentral is MIA or AWOL or whatever. This Grand Central is totally unrelated and took over the domain name because, well, it’s a great domain name that was going to waste.
As for the the other part of your comment…
-david
David,
I hope “…” means “I just joined a startup that is building exactly what you need.”
About the new Grand Central, I’m surprised Angel.com was not mentioned as they pretty much have this same service already – we use it for our business and except for the fact that the IVR can’t understand any of our callers so we have to resort to touchtone navigation, it works great.
-Larry
The features look like something I need, but didn’t know I needed. Good stuff.
I signed up for a beta account, and I plan to kick the tires a bit.
Larry,
I have my hands full with my current company (in a good way). In fact, our lives would be made easier with the exact kind of service you describe.
The “…” meant I need to poke some people and get them to talk for themselves. I think they’re busy creating really cool technology. The demo I saw made me smile though, I think you’ll smile too when you see it.
Now I remember you and Sinu (which is awesome, btw) — we’re going to email you tomorrow for some beta access to some stuff we’re getting ready to roll out for MSPs like yours.
-david
partial feed == blech…
This is another alternative to disposible phone numbers – As well as an option for a Home or Small Business Owner on a budget who spends time in the field or on sales calls –
It would be nice is the user could record his or her own greeting – but perhaps that option will be added to advanced, paying users
Search Engines Web, the user can infact record own greeting as well as name. Other nice feature is you can upload a custom mp3 that would be played back as a ring tone to the calling party.
Jajah already lauched the same product several months ago
http://info.ela...voip_jajah.html
Search Engines WEB,
GrandCentral actually lets you record as many greetings as you want. You can make custom greetings for groups of callers (”work” and “family”) or individual callers. And it doesn’t cost anything. So go crazy.
–Jo
How does this VOIP service deal with electric gates that are controled via the telephone and if they have a solution what is the additional cost?
Great comments everybody. Let me try to answer a few of them. As Jo and others have mentioned, we do allow you to customize your greetings. In fact, we make it simply by letting you click on the “record new greeting” link and a box pops up and asks where you would like GrandCentral to call you in order to record your greeting. We even let you record custom greetings for different groups of callers (Friends, Family, Work, Others) and let you even record a custom greeting for an individual caller if they are in your address book (just click on the “settings” tab in the persons contact card). That way you can have a personal greeting that plays for the boss, etc., whenever that person calls.
Rather than give you disposable numbers, we rather wanted to give you one number for everybody, but then let you quickly and easily block a caller from bothering you at any time. Just mark that caller as SPAM (you can do it when checking messages from your phone, hit the 8 key, or online) and you’ll never be bothered by that caller again.
As to how we work with electric gates, etc., we’re really not in the business of replacing your cell phone, etc., but giving you great features that work across all of your devices and services. As such, you’d just use the phone you currently use to open the gate:)
Keep the comments coming! Thanks, Craig
What is it with people that they feel the need to point out that “Jajah has had this since the stone age and Angel.com even before that” or “sheesh, I have this free with Asterisk”? First, no, these services are really not even similar. Second, even if they were similar, it’s really not that interesting. The question is, who is going to get some traction. There are lots of similar services and only one or a few become successful. So, save it.
I posted some comments here:
http://www.cent...central-station
I think this has some great potential but my biggest concern (and it appears others have the same concern) is about portability if the service dies.
Business cards ain’t cheap! Losing a contact could cost you a fortune.
Allen, thanks for your comment. Let me try to address it. GrandCentral won’t do anything to prevent you from taking your number with you. The FCC’s rules on Local Number Portability seem to slowly be expanding to include VoIP services, but currently your ability to transfer your GrandCentral number to another provider is usually dependent on the provider you are moving to and whether they will support it. We don’t plan on going anywhere anytime soon, and have experience in VoIP (Dialpad) and great investors (Halsey Minor).
Best,
Jo Broussard – GrandCentral
I just completed an interview with Craig the CEO.
http://www.cent...th-grandcentral
Craig really seems to have a good plan and strategy and discusses the portability issue as well.
Thanks Jo above for the explanation as well!
Question to anyone who has tested this: how is the voice quality? If this service is based on VOIP then I would be concerned about the bridge from LAND LINE -> VOIP -> CELL or even worse CELL -> VOIP -> CELL!
pete
@Pete
I was just testing this last night. I am in Seattle and was talking to someone in California. I was using my Verizon cell phone and he was using a normal land line. He said that the quality was better than usual, a noticeable improvement.
Hello, can this service be used to transfer copies of voice mails from land line phones similar to GotVoice? If so, can you keep these copies indefinately through those emails, or are they erased once your actual phone voice mail is erased? Are they linked in any way after the original transfer? Are they then yours to use however you wish, or dependant on continual use of your GrandCentral account?