The Telephone, Exactly How You Want It

I won’t make it a habit to talk about specific products on this blog, but GrandCentral is really something new to me.  GrandCentral is a website (www.grandcentral.com) from Google that appears to be the result of someone sitting down and writing down all the things you want from a phone…and then making it happen.  GrandCentral gives you a phone number and then lets you:

1)  Ring the phones you want, when you want, from the callers that you want and lets you ring (or not ring) certain phones depending on who is calling.

2)  Send the voicemails from all of your phones to email or have them sent as texts to your phone, automatically.

3)  Record different voicemail greetings for different callers or groups of callers.

4)  Import all of your Outlook, Gmail, etc…contacts.

5)  Record phone calls (with permission of both parties).

6)  Switch phones in the middle of a call, like when your phone is running out of batteries.

7)  Call anyone from your contacts over the internet.

You can even put a button on your website or blog that lets people call you from the internet (and you can have them go straight to voicemail if you want…and then get their messages through email).  The biggest downside is that GrandCentral has to give you a new phone number through which to do all of this stuff – you can pick from a range of options, but nevertheless a restricted list of options. 

At the moment, GrandCentral is being run by Google on an invitation-only basis.  If you are interested in getting an invitation.  Send me an email to newtomefeedback@gmail.com with a link to a website featuring something you think might be new to me and I’ll send you an invitation.

Please note that I don’t work for Google or GrandCentral and if you have been reading my blog, you know that I am not very technologically savvy.