GrandCentral: Managing Your Multiple Phone Numbers
Andy Abramson talks about GrandCentral, a new beta telephony service that lets you manage your phone numbers from a single GC phone number. He explains why he likes it, despite PhoneBoy's and Ken Camp's dislike. Don't know about you, but I like to have a single phone number. When I worked for a certain large telecom's consulting division, I carried my own pager plus one from the company, and my cell phone, which later became two. Four phone/ pager numbers for communication is absurd. I only keep one cell number now, a million email addresses, a dozen VoIP soft phone accounts, but no other phone numbers other than the one that I received free from Hullo. Still, I know no one using Hullo, so I only have one (cell) phone number to manage, at present.
On the other hand, I can see myself in the near future paying for Call-In numbers for possibly Skype and SightSpeed. Except it'd sure be nice to have a single VoIP-based phone number that wasn't tied to any one soft phone. That would be some VoIP holy grail (or a single multi-protocol soft phone). Anyone got anything like that? As far as I can tell, that's not what Grand Central does, but it does let you redirect calls to find you - acting like a hub for all of your phone numbers.
For some people, who have multiple phone numbers, either for regular phones, mobiles, or VoIP soft Call-In numbers, GrandCentral might come in handy. But it's another phone number, which you'll have to give out to everyone - unless you'd rather they just left you voicemail on whatever number of yours that they have.
That's not really what I want, but then I only work from home now and am thus in the minority. (For now anyway.) Still, what I'd really like is a single web-based Call-In phone number associated with either my laptop, desktop, or cell phone/ PDA, attached to one soft phone which could handle calls from any of the popular soft phones (Skype, Gizmo Project, Sightspeed, etc.) and IMs (Instant Messengers) such as Aim Pro, Yahoo Messenger or Windows Live Messenger, etc.
Imagine that communications holy grail. It's a tall order. But I think it might happen before the end of the decade.
Written by ewriter on September 29th, 2006 with
no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and Software and Business VoIP and Networks and Residential VoIP.
- [+] Digg: Feature this article
- [+] Del.icio.us: Bookmark this article
- [+] Furl: Bookmark this article