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I’ve been a long time user of and advocate for GrandCentral, an amazing service that was acquired by Google last year.

Since the acquisition, crickets have been chirping when it comes to GrandCentral talking, blogging, or releasing any new features.

Well they’re at least blogging again.  The latest is that they are allowing a forwarding number to be used on two separate accounts.  What does this mean?  Say, for example, a married couple each have their own GrandCentral numbers and they both want to have their home number to be rung whenever either of the GrandCentral numbers are dialed.

Before this new GrandCentral announcement, this would not be possible.  Whoever tried to register the home number second would have been denied by GrandCentral.

Also, according to the blog entry, “a lot of new features are in the works and we look forward to rolling them out quickly!”

Craig, we look forward to seeing them too!

My blog buddy Jonathan posted a blog post of how to get your GSM phone to forward voicemail traffic over to GrandCentral.  I’ve been longing for this feature for quite some time so the topic grabbed my interest.

My trouble is, I can’t get the GSM code which is *61*yournumber# , to work on my N95 with T-mobile.  Has anyone been able to get GSM forwarding codes to work on t-mobile?

UPDATE: on the other blog post, some guy was able to do it with t-mobile.  So now I think I’m being blacklisted.  I have a FlexPay tmobile account, not sure if that has anything to do with it.

This is a follow-up to an earlier post.

Read it for yourself on Google’s Blog - they’ve swallowed GrandCentral.

Looks like google will have even more of my data now.

This is huge (and great) news! According to Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, Google has acquired Grandcentral, a service I’ve discussed many times before. This would be a big development in the VoIP world, in my opinion.

Grandcentral has a great offering and it will complement Google’s other efforts including gmail, gtalk, and VoIP very well.

Good Job Grandcentral!

In this blog post, Grandcentral talks about how they have added ways to call out and have your Grandcentral number show up as the originating CallerID. This is a feature I’m very excited about, but I don’t like their methods so far which include:

1) calling out by clicking a button, which requires being signed on to their site

2) calling out using your mobile smart phone, which requires a $40/month data plan on your mobile

or 3) while in a voicemail that someone has left, hitting 2 to call them back.

What I’d like to see is: a way to dial outbound while NOT being tied to either a PC or smartphone (I have neither). How about being able to dial in to your GC number and then dialing out again through some sort of tone-sensing system?

That would be a great feature.

NOTE: I tried to submit this comment on their blog, but it hasn’t shown up yet. Perhaps they didn’t like the comment?

PS: is there a way to “GrandCentralize” my voicemail? this was eluded to by Craig Walker of Grandcentral on TechCrunch back in April.

David Pogue, of the NY Times gave Grandcentral some great press….it’s good to see to good things happening to a good company

Article Link

Check out the video David did - hilarious!

Technorati Tags: grandcentral, voip

There are so many things that excite me in the tech world, but currently my spotlight is on:

• OpenID - I’m so anxious for some of the big boys to start adopting this single sign-on system. Digg just announced their support of it. Welcome to the club
• GrandCentral - this disruptive technology essentially takes your voicemail box and makes it very similar to email. Route all your calls to this one number and grandcentral takes care of the rest
• VoIP in general - after going VoIP at home, you realize that talk is cheap and that voice should just be another application that uses the internet to deliver it’s services. At work, we’re putting in a VoIP system and I think people will be really impressed with how VoIP will integrate with the rest of the communications pie. Being able to check voicemails in Outlook? That’ll turn heads.
• Twitter - this system has been a rockstar at SXSW and across the net lately. People have finally been turned on to the idea of communication in real time with others. I’m having problems though in getting new people to see the value in twitter - especially in my non-techie friends.
• Gadgets - I still am playing with my new camera, the canon sd800 and playing with all it’s features. I’m so excited about it - the SD800IS is a huge step up from my old Powershot A80. Also I’m still loving my Vizio GV47L - a beautiful TV from Vizio.

Technorati Tags: grandcentral, openid, twitter, voip

It probably appears that I’m a grand central fanboy lately, but hey it’s a great product and I’m excited about it!

So I’m trying out something new - on the right hand side you’ll see a GrandCentral button. It makes it very easy to call me - just click the button, put in your number, and wha-la, we’re connected. Please give it a shot!

Thanks a lot GrandCentral!

Technorati Tags: grandcentral, text message, sms, feature, voip