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. → Read More

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 → Read More

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 → Read More