David Pogue recently sent out the following email message to all his contacts:
“David Pogue has a new, universal phone number: [number omitted] This number rings all my phones at once: home phone, work phone, cellphone, hotel room, wherever I happen to be. The old, individual numbers still work, but you’ll greatly improve your odds of reaching me if you use this new number. I know it’s a hassle to update your records, but this is a “lifetime” number that shouldn’t change again.
In a private note to me, he wrote: “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!”
In that New York Times column, he gives more details:
[GrandCentral’s] motto, “One number for life,” pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral.com, you choose a new, single, unified phone number (more on this in a moment). You hand it out to everyone you know, instructing them to delete all your old numbers from their Rolodexes.
From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uninumber, all of your phones ring simultaneously, like something out of “The Lawnmower Man.”
No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you’re home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.
David runs through some of the other features as well:
- “You can listen to a message someone is leaving, just as you can on a home answering machine.”
- “You can actually record a different voice mail greeting for each person in your address book.”
- “You can pick up on a different phone in midconversation, unbeknownst to the person on the other end.”
- “GrandCentral maintains a database of telemarketer numbers that is constantly updated by reports from its own subscribers. Your phones don’t even ring when a telemarketer in that database tries to reach you.”
- “You can install a “call me” button on your Web site — a great, free way to field calls … without actually posting your phone number.”
Now, many hackers have worked this kind of behavior out for themselves, perhaps using their asterisk server. (Feel free to post your favorite hacks in the comments!) But this is a mainstream consumer service, and as David wrote in his Times column, “GrandCentral has rewritten the rules in the game of telephone.”
I haven’t played with GrandCentral much yet, but it appears to be a textbook Web 2.0 application, building a network-effects business that gets better the more people use it. It’s “software above the level of a single device.” Like iTunes, it provides an integrated application that involves a handheld device, a PC control station (albeit in this case a flash application in a web browser rather than a standalone app), and a server back-end.
Perhaps most importantly, if this service takes off, it’s almost a perfect “Data is the Intel Inside” play, far greater than any email address-book based attempt like Plaxo. It will be the first service outside the phone companies themselves that could build that next generation Web 2.0 address book I’ve been writing about. (See also.)
You can see how cleverly they’ve architected the service to gather additional information from public sources, and then get their customers to enhance them, in the following feature (as well as in their telemarketer blocking, above):
Every GrandCentral caller is announced by name when you answer the phone. (“Call from Ethel Murgatroid.”)
How does it know the name? Sometimes Caller ID supplies it. GrandCentral also knows every name in your online address book, which can import your contacts from Yahoo, Gmail or your e-mail program.
Callers not in these categories are asked to state their names the first time they call. On subsequent calls, GrandCentral recognizes them.
In short, I expect GrandCentral to become one of the premier Web 2.0 and social networking platforms overnight, and it’s squarely aimed at the heart of the communications device used by more people than any PC application will ever touch.
(Note: I was on the board of the company formerly known as Grand Central, which is connected to this one via its name and its primary investor, Halsey Minor, but I have no connection to the current company.)