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Deal is Confirmed: Google Acquired GrandCentral
54 Comments
by Nick Gonzalez on July 2, 2007

Google has confirmed the Grand Central Acquisition we suspected would be announced today or tomorrow. No official word on a price, but we believe it’s in the $50 million range. Google will be moving the service over to Google’s network. A limited number of invitations for GrandCentral beta accounts will still be available. If you have a U.S. telephone number, you can sign up for an invitation at www.grandcentral.com. Current GrandCentral customers will continue to have uninterrupted access to the service.

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  • Ron Palmeri - July 2nd, 2007 at 1:47 pm PDT

    Congrats to Craig, Vincent and the entire Grand Central team. You guys rock!

    reply
  • Josh Nursing - July 2nd, 2007 at 2:02 pm PDT

    Congrats to GrandCentral and to Google too. I explored some of the integration possibilities over at my blog: “Google Telecom, Hello!” :)

    Thanks for breaking out the rumored news, Michael - excellent job.

    Best

    reply
  • Markus Schwarz - July 2nd, 2007 at 2:02 pm PDT

    What a difference a good user interface can make! Congrats!

    reply
  • Jermaine - July 2nd, 2007 at 2:24 pm PDT

    Hope that we will see integration with Google Apps in the near future.

    reply
  • hahahahahh. Nick Just stole Mike's spotlight - July 2nd, 2007 at 2:24 pm PDT

    Hahahhahahah.

    HAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAH

    AHAHAHHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHAH.

    I bet mike say It’s not fair. I was in bathroom peeing.

    HAHAHHAHAahahhah

    Way go nick!!!

    reply
  • Jeff - July 2nd, 2007 at 2:37 pm PDT

    Nice. Just saw the Google logo on grandcentral.com and was going to leave a tip! The informational kind, not the money kind.

    reply
  • Alex - July 2nd, 2007 at 2:40 pm PDT

    My RSS reader is not very wide and simply read: Deal is Confirmed: Google Acquired

    reply
  • Tech Untangled - July 2nd, 2007 at 2:41 pm PDT

    Excellent breaking news in first bring this to everyone’s attention about a week and and confirming it today. I had written a piece on why acquiring GrandCentral would make sense for Google. See it at http://techuntangled.com/what-.....for-google

    reply
  • Stan - July 2nd, 2007 at 2:44 pm PDT

    Congrats to GrandCentral team, you’ve done a marvelous job and you deserve this!

    reply
  • Casey - July 2nd, 2007 at 2:46 pm PDT

    This is cool. Hopefully they wont orphan this one.

    They can data mine this service as well with site information from the widgets. Service professionals can have a widget on their site and Grandcentral will connect them to their customers, then Google can use this info for all sorts of stuff.

    This will be a nice addition for webmasters as well as a good tool for anyone with more than one phone. I have been on the fence for awhile now with GC but will probably signup now to check it out.

    reply
  • Casey - July 2nd, 2007 at 2:49 pm PDT

    Is the service now closed to new users? If you go to the sign up page they are not allowing new customers to sign up directly.

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  • Paul - July 2nd, 2007 at 2:51 pm PDT

    Nice to see a well-designed service get the backing of a big company, but how long until a string of Google-branded privacy laws?

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  • pbh - July 2nd, 2007 at 2:52 pm PDT

    does anyone know if i could ever port my existing number from an existing wireless provider to GrandCentral? maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but if i could seamlessly transfer to their service without ever having to give anyone a new number that would be clutch.

    reply
  • Noah - July 2nd, 2007 at 3:08 pm PDT

    I bet the VCs who valued Geni at $100 million feel kind of dumb…

    reply
  • listikal - July 2nd, 2007 at 3:51 pm PDT

    Wow, now telecom. Google continues to move towards becoming the Brain of ‘Pinky and the Brain’

    reply
  • carmen - July 2nd, 2007 at 5:31 pm PDT

    wrao a flash interface on top of asterisk and get acquired for 50 million? man…im in the wrong line of work

    reply
  • Loic - July 2nd, 2007 at 6:38 pm PDT

    @carmen, if only it was that simple.
    As far as I know asterisk does not manage call control via a SS7 stack. GrandCentral is a little bit more than a PBX with a web interface. But I agree the idea is simple, and I wonder why telecom operators didn’t provide such service before (well, I know :). We might see more companies providing such service… and later the telecom operators will provide their own and try to kill all the GrandCentral-likes by taking advantage of their network (the only advantage they will still have).
    GrandCentral provides a visual voicemail (you see on the screen of your cellphone the list of voicemails, and you can listen to them in the order you want). AT&T introduced this moth the feature for the iPhone only. GrandCentral can do it for months, for all cellphone with web access, for all telecom operators. Hopefully, having Google on the playground will stimulate the telecom market by providing more services for low cost. Phone calls didn’t really changed for the past 40 years.
    They definitely need a 2.0 boost !

    reply
  • Phil - July 2nd, 2007 at 7:02 pm PDT

    Any thoughts on why GrandCentral will no longer allow custom RingShare tones, but RingCentral offers much the same service without issue? This was just announced by GrandCentral via email and is on the FAQ for the acquisition.

    reply
  • randyedmonds - July 2nd, 2007 at 7:32 pm PDT

    I am very dissapointed that they no longer allow custom uploaded RingShare tones. It was a great feature for my business. I replaced the standard ring-ring that the caller hears with a nice recording saying “Welcome to the reservation line. Please wait while we connect you to a representative….”

    reply
  • David Mackey - July 2nd, 2007 at 9:23 pm PDT

    SWEET! This is great news. I expect (and hope) that Google will make the service will all perks advertising supported…And hopefully ramp up development.

    reply
  • Yezidi - July 3rd, 2007 at 7:45 am PDT

    Already the service is showing signs of distress. People were calling my GC number this morning and getting nothing, not even a ring. This is going to be a rough transition I believe. I have decided to stop using the service for a few months until everything is worked out.

    reply
  • Rob - July 3rd, 2007 at 8:06 am PDT

    does anyone know how the $50 was arrived at? How many subscribers does Grandcentral have? Do they have revenue?

    reply
  • John McKinley - July 3rd, 2007 at 8:11 am PDT

    Thanks for being first out of the gate with this. It is great to see the work of Grand Central married to the marketing magic of being a Google portfolio company. Having seen what that did to Picassa (now 70+MM downloads), I think it bodes well for Grand Central to position itslef as the primary telephony ID for small businesses. Combined with Google Apps, Google Base, etc., I think Google has all the making of a disrupter in the small to medium business market. More thoughts at my blog: http://www.greatfallsventures.com

    reply
  • Craig - July 3rd, 2007 at 9:17 am PDT

    Grand Central is a pretty awesome idea, I’m on the list right now myself.

    Does anyone know if there is anything like this for physical address? Like a virtual PO box. For instance, I love in/around Boston but I’ve moved a good 8 times in 10 years. Rather than changing my business address everytime, I continue to use my parents address.

    What would be awesome is if I could have Boston-based PO box (or address) that would actually just send to wherever I happen to live at the time.

    Anyone know of something that exists that does this? And don’t say the Post Office because that’s not really what I’m looking for.

    reply
  • Daniel - July 3rd, 2007 at 12:46 pm PDT

    Great idea of Grand Central and a smart buy of Google!

    reply
  • Chris - July 3rd, 2007 at 11:52 pm PDT

    This acquisition is just part of their masterplan - see link

    http://frostfirebuzz.com/googl.....ything-yet

    reply
  • Anthon-Pieter77 - July 4th, 2007 at 2:12 am PDT

    Seems to me Google wants to expand their collaboration apps (Docs Spreadsheets, Presentations) with a voice service so collaboration on docs can be even easier, and they needed specialized knowledge on multiple lines voice service to enhance Google Talk. See my post on http://www.77lab.com/google_vo.....70307.html.

    reply
  • Patrick - July 8th, 2007 at 9:55 am PDT

    If anyone has an invite to share, I’d love to check out GrandCentral’s service.

    Please send it to pcmcd at hotmail

    Thanks

    reply
  • Shaun - July 25th, 2007 at 7:48 pm PDT

    I’ve got 10 invites….first come first serve I guess.

    shaun.kerr@gmail.com

    reply

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