This is a strange story. Rumors circulated today that Silicon Valley based startup Ribbit was acquired by British Telecom, and VentureBeat ran with the story. The company later denied the rumors, but wouldn’t comment on whether or not merger discussions were occurring or not.

The strange part is this – while Ribbit executives are denying the acquisition to the press, they’ve simultaneously been (quite happily) telling all their friends that BT has acquired them for $55 million, says a source who’s heard the story.

BT plans to use the Ribbit platform to build out a GrandCentral competitor, they’ve said. GrandCentral, a service that manages all of your phone services, was acquired by Google in July 2007 for $50 million. Since the acquisition, however, GrandCentral has gone nowhere – no new features and intermittent down time are the only GrandCentral milestones over the last year.

From past experience, this suggests a deal is in the process of closing but isn’t legally done yet, which gives executives the ability to deny acquisition rumors. But like most leaks, the company getting bought just can’t not tell their friends (loosely defined) all about it. Confidentially, of course.

Ribbit has raised $13 million in capital.

Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it.

When I first started out in the real world in the mid-nineties voicemail was an important productivity tool. I remember people talking about the pros and cons of various enterprise voicemail systems – which had the best forwarding and group messaging, which allowed for archiving, and how many messages could be stored and for how long. Even though email was around, people were still unsure how to use it. Letters went on letterhead and were formal. Voicemail was informal and common. Email etiquette was still being developed. It was good for mass-forwarding jokes and moving Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files around, but it took a while for email to take over as older generations moved out of the workplace or got with the program.

But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.

Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally – let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back.

How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?”

Senders often feel guilty for leaving voicemails, too. And to make sure you get the message, quite often people will follow up with a text message – “Just left you a VM, it’s important” – just so you know it’s there.

There are startups that are trying to make voicemail more useful. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voicemail feature helps clean up the clutter, too. But at the end of the day you still need to take time to listen to those voicemails, and that usually comes after other equally urgent but less disruptive tasks.

The services that really make voicemail more usable are those that convert voicemail into text and then send it to you via email or SMS (Spinvox, PhoneTag Yap and Jott, for example).

More mobile carriers are offering text conversion for a monthly or per-message fee. It’s my guess this will become more and more common. Voice is here to stay as a data input method, but listening to messages will certainly become an increasing luxury, to be reserved for loved ones or those messages that aren’t transcribed properly (or you need to hear it for tone or emotion).

For now most people don’t have voicemail transcription services. So think before you voicemail, more and more people just find it annoying.

GrandCentral, Google’s $50 million phone company, has been down all morning (see overview of service here). And that means every single user who has started using their GrandCentral phone number isn’t able to receive any calls. Users are complaining on Twitter, and I’ve confirmed this as well by simply calling friends who use the service. Calls will not go through.

We’ve noted problems with the service in the past, but never a general outage. The site is down. The service is down. Everything appears to be offline.

If you want to be a phone company, and get your users to rely on you to manage all of your incoming calls, this simply cannot happen. There are undoubtedly going to be a lot of very upset homeless people this morning, as well as GrandCentral’s other users.

GrandCentral’s blog is offline as well. If Google wants users to take the service seriously in the future, they should make some kind of announcement on their main blog letting users know what happened and when they can expect the service to be back.

Update: service is back online sometime before noon PST. Still no word from them on the cause of the outage.

Update 2: Cofounder Craig Walker posts the following on the GrandCentral blog:

I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service.

Thanks for your patience with us and we’ll continue to work to make the service better by the day. – Craig Walker

Most companies target early adopters with their new products, hoping those users will tell all of their friends all about it. But not GrandCentral, the company Google acquired for $50 million in July 2007. They’ve gone after the homeless demographic. Twice.

Two years ago they offered to give homeless people free access to their (already free) service. It worked so well (4,000 signups) that yesterday they announced it all over again.

This time Mayor Newsom threw in a bunch of sound bites about how this will “empower” the homeless, improve their morale, etc. (last time they were only able to get Newsom’s deputy chief of staff to comment).

To be clear, I think it’s great that Google is trying to help out the homeless. But what I really applaud is the marketing audacity it takes to announce that you are making an already free service free for the homeless. And then do it again two years later. And to do it even though homeless people already have access to free voicemail through at least one nonprofit organization.

I wonder if Google can pull off the same stunt in the future for new products. Free cloud storage for the homeless, anyone?

Update: Good comment by Scott Rafer below with a different viewpoint:

Please check with local experts when they are available. It’s all about SF politics, and the gimmick is Mayor Newsom’s not Google’s. I’m generally a supporter of this mayor, but his terrible Care-not-Cash program ripped prepaid mobile phones out of the hands of many working homeless — the people who have the best shot to get themselves out of trouble. They are often doing day work for employers who know the phone numbers at the homeless shelters and will not call them or accept calls from them.

GrandCentral and similar services provide the Mayor with some air cover and are at least a mediocre replacement for prepaid phones in this use case.

Update 2: GrandCentral cofounder Craig Walker responds in the comments.

When it comes to connecting with new friends safely and privately, Jangl fits the bill. The “Social Communications Widget” lets you make calls, send SMSs, and leave voice mails without exposing anyone’s phone number through a simple widget.

In contrast to their competitor, Jaxtr, they’ve been mainly spreading through a series of direct deals with social networking sites (Match.com, Tagged, AdultFriendFinder, and Fubar) and a Facebook/Bebo application (potentially on 80 million profiles). Jaxtr, on the other hand, has been spreading mainly through email links and personal websites (5 million users in under 5 months).

Now they’ve forged a deal to be featured on the maverick of dating sites, PlentyOfFish. PlentyOfFish is like every other dating site you’ve heard of, but free. Free has actually paid off pretty well for founder Markus Frind, who runs the site from his Vancouver apartment and takes in over $10 million a year in advertising.

Comscore ranked the site the number one dating site in December 2007, with an average of 1.3 billion page views a month (70,000 sessions and 3 million page views an hour).

Jangl’s widget will let daters call each other, send SMSs, and leave voice mails all without sharing a real number. The functionality makes it easy to take the next step in a relationship without sacrificing privacy, or just discreet phone sex. Calls will be terminated on Jajah’s servers as part of their existing relationship. Like PlentyOfFish itself, Jangl will be monetizing the service through text advertising; a first for the company. On other sites, the service is either ad-free or paid for as part of membership (match.com).

I’ve found social calling widgets (particularly Jaxtr and Jangl) to be the most attractive part of the VOIP market because they’re not competing in a race to the lowest calling rates, but adding real utility to our existing phone lines. Other voice widgets include Ccube, Tringme, and Snapvine. While monetization is still somewhat up in the air, both companies are testing out business models (paid Jaxtr minutes, or Jangl’s revenue sharing). Going forward we’ll see which models do and don’t work. I also expect both companies to continue adopting more advanced features similar to Google’s GrandCentral.

Nearly every VOIP related startup has their own click-to-call widget, Jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr, and even GrandCentral. These widgets let you easily and sometimes anonymously set up a call with friends over the web. They’re very useful and come packed with features like voicemail and texting. However, each of these services connects phones to phones, which still eats away at your mobile minutes while you’re talking to that business contact or MySpace hottie.

TringMe offers a bit more flexibility. Callers can ditch their phone and call directly through their Flash widget to your mobile phone, landline, and GTalk (Yahoo and Skype coming soon). All they need is a microphone and one click. Although they’re still in private beta, you can try the demo widget to the right for an idea of the experience.

Similar to the other services, your phone number is kept private and the calls are free (now’s the time for that overseas call). You can also set the widget to just receive voicemails, which are emailed to you, saved on your standard mailbox, or recorded and played back in GTalk. There is one major drawback, though. Since there is no virtual phone number involved, callers have to be at a computer and can’t call you while they’re on the go.

Naturally such an easy and anonymous calling service is susceptible to abuse, and I don’t see any countermeasures in place to keep out prank calls and telemarketers. The other services have verified phone numbers and white/black lists to keep abuse to a minimum. I expect TringMe will have to incorporate similar controls to make people more comfortable with using the widget.

So much for GrandCentral’s “one number for life” promise. The company is turning off customer phone numbers and giving them new ones following their acquisition by Google last month.

Troy Schneider received such a notice, advising him that in 8 days his GrandCentral number would be canceled and that he would be required to immediately start using a new number allocated to him. Judi Sohn received the same message: with no prior warning she had 8 days left on her existing phone number then it would cease to operate. Sohn was fortunate to some extent: Google has offered to pay for the reprinting of her business cards, but that would appear to be a one off, and a token gesture at that.

The inconvenience of losing a telephone number, particularly for a business, is more than just stationery. Paper telephone listings must be changed (some people still use them), sign writing must be fixed, and every single listing of the old number has to be found and changed. Most land line telephone providers would offer a redirection service for the old number, however with Google it’s simply a matter of 8 days then no more phone number. Every customer that tries calling the old number post cancellation and cannot connect to the business is potentially a lost sale.

There was no comment at the time of writing from Google or GrandCentral. Ironically the last post on the GrandCentral blog talks about the wonders of being able to keep a GrandCentral Number for life.

Update: Founder Craig Walker comments below and notes that this affected on 434 users:

Everybody, thanks for your comments and I want to quickly reply to try to clear the air regarding this issue. I’ll post a full blog about this on the GrandCentral site in just a bit, but first I want to assure everybody that we are NOT disconnecting anyone’s service. Unfortunately we received word recently that one of our partners was stopping their service in part of the country and since that time we’ve been working to port those phone numbers to other partners. We’ve done this successfully for the vast majority of those users but unfortunately there were approximately 400 users whose numbers could not be ported (434 to be exact). As soon as we found out these users could not be ported to other partners, we contacted those users, set up an alternative GrandCentral number in the same area code for them, and gave them a reply email to request additional GrandCentral number choices. Vincent (our COO and Co-Founder) and I have been personally replying to these emails to help make this transition easier. This would have been these case whether or not we were acquired. We completely sympathize with any pain or disruption this might cause these users and will continue to work directly with them to help find a solution. I will post more on our blog shortly, but wanted to give you all a quick heads up.

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.

A follow up to our post a week ago: A source close to the deal has confirmed to us that Google has closed the acquisition of GrandCentral and will be announcing it this week, probably today or tomorrow. Acquisitions are generally announced after the close of market, so look for this after 1 pm PST on the Google blog or in a press release (or both). If not today, possibly tomorrow. We have been unable to get the company or Google to comment on this, but our source is solid.

We still don’t have confirmation of a price, but we’ve heard it’s in the Jotspot range – $50 million or more.

When the deal is announced we’ll hopefully hear details on planned integration with Gtalk, Gmail, etc.

Our overview of GrandCentral features is here.

Google is in acquisition discussions with telephone management startup GrandCentral, we’ve learned, and we have a high degree of confidence that the deal has actually been closed. We are trying to nail down the acquisition price. Just last week I flagged this company as the most exciting startup we’re currently tracking.

The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.” As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is a real cost. If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number. What happens when that person calls that number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time.

The company, which has raised less than $6 million in capital from Minor Ventures (the exact amount has never been disclosed), beta launched just last September. Earlier this year mainstream press and blogger attention heated up.

The company may have received too much press attention before the product was ready, and we reported on some backlash from beta users abandoning the service in March. Still, the company pushed ahead, launching a mobile product and other features.

GrandCentral was recently pitching a second round of financing to Silicon Valley venture capitalists, but broke off discussions abruptly as the Google talks heated up.

I’m speculating on where Google will use GrandCentral, but the synergies with Gmail and GTalk are fairly obvious and could be the next step in Google’s competition with Skype and other instant messaging platforms.

This is, in my opinion, a great move by Google. Grand Central is an awesome productivity and simplifies the lives of users with multiple phones by giving them a single phone number and letting them handle calls via rules. It’s a natural fit with GTalk and Gmail.

Google won’t comment on this story. I have an email in to GrandCentral to see if they’ll confirm.

We’ve followed new telephone management startup GrandCentral since its debut in September 2006. The company has deservedly received a lot of blogger and mainstream press: Tim O’Reilly said “The Web 2.0 Address Book May Have Arrived” when talking about it, and the New York Times did a long overview article in March.

The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.” As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is a real cost. If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number. What happens when that person calls that number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time.

Our follow up coverage wasn’t entirely positive. In late March we noted some hiccups with the service that led some beta testers to abandon it. But we’ve continued to use the service, covered its mobile site launch, and in general I think it is one of the standout startups of the last twelve months.

For those of you who aren’t using it yet, I’ve put together my user notes over the last couple of months. There are a lot of features to get used to, and to get the most out of the service you should be aware of at least some of them.

This is a service to keep an eye on – They are certainly still working out some of the bugs, but the GrandCentral team has created a truly useful service with less than $6 million in capital. I would not be surprised, given this acquisition climate, to see someone pick them up in the near term.

Here’s the TechCrunch Quick Guide to GrandCentral:
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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.

New telephone management startup GrandCentral is off to a solid start. They showed a preview of the service at the DEMO conference last year, and we gave GrandCentral a solid review, as did Rafe Needleman and others.

The idea is simple, and compelling for many people with lots of phone numbers. GrandCentral will issue you a new local phone number for free. You then connect your existing phone numbers to the GrandCentral number in your account, and give the new number out to all of your contacts. When someone calls your GrandCentral phone number, rules that you set determine what happens to the call. If it’s someone you’ve whitelisted, they’ll go right through to you. If not, they record their name and you listen to it before deciding whether to take the call or send it to voicemail. Also, GrandCentral will call all of your old phones simultaneously, so you can choose which one to pick up.

GrandCentral came out of private beta a couple of weeks ago and got great mainstream press coverage. David Pogue at the New York Times may have doubled the valuation of their next venture capital round when he he wrote “It’s a rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.” In a private message to Tim O’Reilly, Pogue said “I’m using, of course, GrandCentral, which was the topic of my column today. It’s pretty awesome–I’d think you might be a prime candidate, too!” O’Reilly then went on to say “Web 2.0 Address Book May Have Arrived” in describing the service.

That NYT article convinced a lot of people to try it out. Over the last week, I’ve had ten or so contacts email me with their new GrandCentral number, and asked me to use that going forward. But there’s a real cost to getting everyone to change their phone numbers for you. And there are other costs, such as re-printing business cards, etc., that have to be considered as well. So while I continue to test the service, I haven’t started asking contacts to use it.

GrandCentral May Have Some Kinks To Work Out

I was surprised when two of the people who sent out their new GrandCentral number to me and other contacts sent a follow up email a few days later, asking everyone to ignore the phone number and go back to the previous normal cell or other phone. I followed up with both of them to ask why they were abandoning the service.

One person, who uses his desk and cell phone “constantly” to do business, said that it only worked properly about half the time. When you whitelist phone numbers, they are supposed to ring right through without having to record their name or wait. Even with their caller ID turned off, callers on his white list said they were still being put in the queue. Important clients, who were supposed to bypass the review, were getting pissed off. “I just couldn’t afford the risk” he said. “When I kept hearing the recorded name of my most important client and realize he’s waiting on hold while I stumble for the “1″ button to put him through, I knew I couldn’t keep using it.” he also said that clients were complaining that calls weren’t picked up at all and they were being put through to voicemail. “These guys don’t do voicemail” he said. “They simply call my competitor.”

The other contact also complained that the forwarding and review services just didn’t work all the time and he was missing important calls. He also said that the call transfer service, where you hit “*” and the call is transferred from your desk phone to your cell phone seemlessly while you run from your office to your car, didn’t really work at all. He also said that when he picked up one phone, say his cell, his desk phone often kept ringing and had to be picked up and then hung up again for it to stop.

Both of these guys rely heavily on their phones and can’t miss calls. They may not be appropriate users of GrandCentral during the open beta period. Both said they’d change back to the service if they knew it would work properly.

In theory, GrandCentral is awesome. But this is one startup where the “beta” tag needs to be taken seriously.

If you have your own positive or negative experiences with GrandCentral, please share them.

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.
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