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April 25, 2007

GrandCentral Mobile Is Live

Michael Arrington

34 comments »

Telephone management startup GrandCentral launched a mobile version of the service yesterday, although they have not announced the product yet. The mobile site is available at grandcentral.com/mobile. It will not load properly from a desktop browser, but it works just fine from all the mobile devices I tested. I assume they are blocking normal browsers to keep it quiet until the official launch.

Like Gmail’s mobile site, GrandCentral Mobile is a lightweight version of your normal account and the primary use of it will be to review and administer voicemails. All of the normal functionality is included (view and play messages, reply, forward, flag, delete, etc.) You can also access your address book and make basic ringing and greeting account changes. Voicemails are in MP3 format, so your phone will need to be able to play MP3s if you want to listen to them.

The interface provides “visual voicemail” which is one of the anticipated features of the upcoming iPhone (see our coverage of GotVoice from last month, with similar features).

Another cool feature of GrandCentral: set your cell phone voicemail feature to forward calls to your GrandCentral phone number. That way all of your voicemails will be kept in one place even if people still use your cell phone number. GrandCentral does not simply re-ring your cell when you make this setting.

Our recent coverage of the company is here.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. MobileCrunch » GrandCentral Launches Mobile Version

    April 25th, 2007 at 2:28 pm

  2. CrackBerryJunkie

    April 26th, 2007 at 2:15 pm

Comments

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  1. Ryan Merket

    April 25th, 2007 at 2:15 pm

    This should come in real handy with my design firm. Thanks!

  2. Josh

    April 25th, 2007 at 2:16 pm

    No comments yet. Whats happening. Hmmm

  3. Abhishek

    April 25th, 2007 at 2:16 pm

    Grand Central already has some cool tools and features on the web. Such an application is going to b really useful!

  4. Abhishek

    April 25th, 2007 at 2:18 pm

    See there are three in just a span of two minutes :D !

  5. Alejandro

    April 25th, 2007 at 2:47 pm

    I’m confused.

    **Is GC going after the consumer market or business market?

    **I’m a firm believer that perception is reality. But, ALL these offerings are available in the market today. Look at GotVMail (claim 30K customers) and Ringcentral (claim 25K customers).

    **How is GC any different from those two companies?

    **What is the sustainable advantage they have over the other two companies? Is the answer Halsey Minors wallet?

    **Is the technology platform based on Sylantro, BroadSoft… if so they are hosed (rumor has it that GotVmail is using Sylantro. If true they will always be Sylantro’s “b*tch”.)

    **Is GC using Asterisks? If so, what is the value here? Is it their excellent public relations department

    Again going back to my point - perception is reality!

  6. Craig Walker

    April 25th, 2007 at 2:52 pm

    Thanks for the note on GC Mobile. Although we hoped to keep this quiet for a few more days (at least) feel free to try it out from your cell browsers and we’d love any feedback. Shoot me an email a craig at grand central dot com and let me know if you have any particular device or other issues.

    Michael also mentioned a feature to “GrandCentralize” your existing phones so you can get all of your voicemail into one GrandCentral voicemail box, even if people call your existing cell phone directly. We’ll be announcing more about that in the near future…need to keep some secrets.

    Best - Craig Walker, GrandCentral

  7. Eric

    April 25th, 2007 at 3:32 pm

    Alejandro…it sounds like you are confused. Don’t you want choice? Maybe you like Burger King more than McDonalds? By your logic anybody who comes up with a feature by definition stop all future innovation on that features. Would you rather go to 20 different websites and join 20 different services to cobble together a bunch of features that Grandcentral gives you in one? Would you rather pay RingCentral $15 a month or more for a subset of features that grandcentral gives you for free? And I’d hardly count 25K or 30K customer bases as having cornered the marked for GotVMail or Ringcentral. I’d bet Grandcentral has a lot more than that combined. But I digress…there’s about 15 ways grandcentral seems to be better than those companies, but that’s for you to figure out. Or not. Its your choice.

  8. Sven Schoene

    April 25th, 2007 at 3:59 pm

    Sounds like a thing Apple won’t be too happy it exists. Well, competition is good for the people and I would really like to have “Visual Voicemails”, even though it’s just for goofing around in the end.

    Sven Schoene

  9. Alejandro

    April 25th, 2007 at 4:01 pm

    Eric - I assure you I know the market very well. What I’m not understanding is the GC marketing message. Who is the target audience for their offerings?

    I like the fact that GotVMail, RingCentral have such a large customer base. As a matter of fact, by GC entering the market it just validates the other guys.

    As far a saying that GC has more PAYING customers than both GotVmail and Ringcentral I respectfully ask that you lay off the crack pipe. NO WAY!

    The ONLY barrier to entry into this space is marketing dollars and good UI developers. The technology can be acquired for FREE (Asterisks).

    Nevertheless, I hope ALL these companies do well.

  10. Max Hyatt

    April 25th, 2007 at 4:05 pm

    I currently use GrandCentral, and have to say its a great service. Having a mobile version of GrandCentral almost offers all that I could ask of them. I only wish they’d get SMS forwarding to work. I’d like to have messages sent to my GC account forwarded to my cell phone. That’ll complete this service for me.

    -Max Hyatt

  11. Rufo Sanchez

    April 25th, 2007 at 6:08 pm

    GrandCentral is neat, but I wish they would’ve looked into their LATAs a bit more - the numbers they’re handing out for 585 aren’t part of the Rochester LATA and are long-distance calls (and Rochester is the only major city in the 585 area code - the numbers they’re handing out are one of the few that are not local calls from Rochester.)

    Once they get that straightened out, I’ll be handing out my (new) GrandCentral number like candy.

  12. Andrew

    April 25th, 2007 at 6:10 pm

    Terrible service. Never works like it should. I have missed many important calls because of this service.

  13. Alexander Plank

    April 25th, 2007 at 6:45 pm

    The mobile version loads perfectly fine in Firefox…

  14. Maia Bittner

    April 25th, 2007 at 7:00 pm

    Isn’t this the same as YouMail?

  15. Wes

    April 25th, 2007 at 7:12 pm

    Yeah, looks similar to YouMail.

  16. Major B

    April 25th, 2007 at 7:52 pm

    Seriously — does this have major bugs — I hate that when these companies are full of holes in their service!

  17. JT

    April 25th, 2007 at 8:04 pm

    Nice feature I noticed of the mobile version is you can have it call any number for you. It’ll dial your phone first, then after you answer it’ll dial the other party but the cool part is that now the other parties caller id shows your grandcentral number, not your cell of home number. Excellent for home businesses or new startups

  18. Tony Delk

    April 25th, 2007 at 8:20 pm

    This works great on my desktop browser too. Seems like it’s a great way for users who don’t have flash (or have disabled flash) to use grandcentral.

  19. Craig

    April 25th, 2007 at 10:43 pm

    Rufo…Sorry about Rochester, but we’ll get more local numbers added shortly. We’re adding a bunch of new NPA-NXX numbers and thought we had Rochester covered already. - Craig

  20. Aaron Myers

    April 25th, 2007 at 11:18 pm

    I can’t get it to work on my Blackberry 8100. The website works fine, when I try to listen to a message it freaks out.

  21. Hackaback

    April 25th, 2007 at 11:29 pm

    Awesome thing

  22. Sappy

    April 25th, 2007 at 11:31 pm

    Cool Info

  23. Vincent Paquet

    April 26th, 2007 at 1:38 am

    Aaron,
    Older Blackberry models don’t seem to play MP3s. I believe they started with the Pearl. It works with the 8800 as well. The new models have a totally seamless integration between the browser and the MP3 player.
    Vincent

  24. Judi Sohn

    April 26th, 2007 at 5:12 am

    I have been very impressed with GrandCentral in the few weeks I’ve been using it for a work phone number outside my home area code. I have never had a problem with it.

    Just wanted to point out that the GrandCentral blog says that the click-to-call feature in the mobile version (and I assume the desktop version) is only free “for a few days.” I guess pricing will be announced shortly for premium features.

  25. Rufo Sanchez

    April 26th, 2007 at 6:00 am

    Craig,
    I (and several other people I’ve pointed toward GrandCentral) await with bated breath. :-)

  26. pallet jack

    April 26th, 2007 at 6:26 am

    Seems like a great - idea. The market is better than most startups featured on Techcrunch.

    - Most enter an over crowded market / etc …. This one has a very good chance

  27. Gslacks

    April 26th, 2007 at 10:38 am

    I think Grand Central is a great idea and I’ve been seeing a bunch of press about them lately. The problem with Grand Central is the service is only functional until they go out of business. I can’t see people paying any kind of montly fee for this…so I would give the company about a year before its dead.

  28. HelloAgain

    April 26th, 2007 at 10:57 am

    I kinda get it, but like Gslacks said, can money be made off of it?

  29. David Mackey

    April 26th, 2007 at 7:51 pm

    GrandCentral is a pretty innovative product…I setup an account though it hasn’t become a central part of my life yet.

  30. testing123

    April 26th, 2007 at 11:33 pm

    hello. testing - testing 123 techcrunch

  31. Boris Elpiner

    April 27th, 2007 at 11:25 am

    This is Boris Elpiner from RingCentral. It’s interesting to see RingCentral mentioned in several discussions involving GrandCentral.

    Alejandro, I think you’ve asked good questions that really define differences in the two services. RingCentral is designed specifically for small businesses. GrandCentral offers some very cool features that are, I’m sure, are great for consumers. RingCentral is a virtual phone system that is a lifeline for tens of thousands of small businesses.

    BTW, RingCentral developed and owns all of the technology for our service. We just could not get the functionality and value our customers demand from Asterisk or any currently available commercial platform.

    Great comments, I’m glad that the Web-based telecom is getting so much interest.

    Boris Elpiner – RingCentral

  32. Sy

    May 17th, 2007 at 4:54 pm

    Craig,

    Any chance that you will be adding “212″ numbers as well. I know of other VOIP who do so already. It would be nice, if this wish became a reality.

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