GrandCentral - Manage your phones with one number!

Grand central has since been acquired by Google and is now called Google Voice.

Recently, I came across a telephone provider that had come up with an innovative approach of treating your phone number. GrandCentral operates on the simple concept that your phone number(s) should be tied to you, not the other way around!

What a neat concept! These days, most of us have at least three phone lines. Heck, some of us even have more phone lines than TV remote controls! How would it be if we can give out just one number to all of our contacts and that one number then manages the rest of our numbers? That way, regardless of the number of times our numbers may change, as long as the main number doesn't change, we don't have to communicate a number change ever again! That one main number is the number that you can now have from GrandCentral.

Once a GrandCentral (GCNumber) phone number is assigned to you, you can keep it for ever and you can link up all of your US numbers to your (US) GCNumber. Anybody calling your GCNumber will be forwarded to the (USA) numbers that you have asked your GCNumber to forward the call to. There are a host of other cool settings that can be setup right down to the individual contact level. You can record your conversation with a press of a button, have your voicemails forwarded in the form of emails, setup buttons on websites (like the one I have in the sidebar on this blog), transfer your call to another of your phones in the middle of your conversation and much much more.

Check out the demo that is posted on Tom's blog. For more information, goto the GrandCentral website or google 'grandcentral phone'.

Itching to check it out? Ever since Google purchased Grand Central early this month, signing up is by invitation only. I had been able to sign up thanks to Tom, and I now have a very few invites left. Just leave your full name and email Id. in a comment if you would like to be invited.