I got a note from Craig Walker at GrandCentral over the weekend describing the press release below that's going out today. Lots of press announcements today tied into all the excitement at CES.

Craig was giving me a quick heads up about GrandCentral’s upcoming Phone-Spam filter that's announced here. The GrandCentral Phone-Spam filter will allow anybody coming to www.grandcentral.com/stopphonespam to enter a phone number of an abusive caller and to enter additional information about the call.  GrandCentral subscribers will be able apply the community-generated filter to their account to protect all of their incoming calls against unwanted telemarketers and phone scams. 

Craig and the GrandCentral team are really excited about giving all users the opportunity to share the information they’ve learned through painful unwanted phone calls in the past and to protect everybody in the future.  By pooling the resources of the community this will finally give telephones some level of protection that email programs have had for a long time.

I'm not sure when Craig and I will get a chance to catch up and chat again. I know he's going to be at CES this week and at Internet Telephony later in the month. Due to some schedule conflicts, I won't be at either of those. I think my next event is the O'Reilly ETel conference. That one's local to Craig, so hopefull we can connect in person there

I confess some misgivings, although slight, about this particular enhancement. I don't know that i'd necessaril embrace the broad set of GrandCentral users choice of who's a spammer and who isn't. If there were some definded controls, perhaps, but it seems to me that groupthink spam filtering on phone calls doesn't provide me a lot of value. Then again, I get very, very few misdrected spam phone calls. I don't see this as a problem myself, but I realize it's a big problem for many folks.

For me, this would have been far down the value chain on enhancements I'd hoped to see. I'd be much happier with the ability to direct calls from GrandCentral to a SkypeID, GizmoID, or SIP URI as a new feature. Keep in mind, that's my own wants. I know the development team at GrandCentral is working on some of that and that some features are easier to implement than others.

What I do see as important and laudable is that the GrandCentral team isn't resting. They continue to improve and enhance their great solution. Kudos to them for being aggressively on the ball!

GrandCentral Provides World’s First PhoneSpam Filter
Community-contributed database to protect everyone from unwanted callers for free Fremont, Calif. Jan. 8, 2007 – GrandCentral Communications, Inc. (www.grandcentral.com), a next-generation personal communications company that offers unprecedented protection, control and personalization features to its users, today announced the release of its community-wide PhoneSpam™ Filter. The first of its kind, this free service employs GrandCentral’s proprietary technology and its own database of abusive callers together with a user-generated list of telemarketers to filter out unwelcome or insidious calls with a check of a box.

“In the email world you have tools to protect yourself—in the phone world you don’t. You’re naked,” said Craig Walker, CEO of GrandCentral Communications. “Unsolicited phone calls from telemarketers, scam artists and other annoying callers are intrusive and unwelcome and continue to be an issue. This is the first time everyone can be protected on all their phones and the protection only increases as the community continues to contribute information.”

The basis of the GrandCentral service is built around GrandCentral’s One Number…for Life™ service that provides users with a local number that will ring all of a users’ existing telephones. As visitors and users report telemarketers and other unwanted callers to GrandCentral at www.grandcentral.com/stopphonespam once confirmed these numbers are added to the PhoneSpam™ Filter. Whenever one of the numbers on the PhoneSpam™ list calls a GrandCentral user who has enabled the filter, those calls will be caught by GrandCentral and sent directly to the users’ Spam Voicemail folder. As more telemarketers and abusive callers are reported, the
community-wide system increases in its effectiveness and provides even greater protection to GrandCentral members.

The PhoneSpam™ Filter is one of the many features provided to GrandCentral’s users as part of its FREE service that work across all phones regardless of type, network or service provider. Other privacy features include Call Screening, ListenIn™ which lets you listen from any phone to your voicemail messages as they are being left, and
Spam and Block lists which let you flag any message or call in your inbox as Spam so that all future calls will be blocked or go directly to a user’s Spam Voicemail folder.

About GrandCentral
GrandCentral Communications is a next-generation personal communications company that gives consumers unprecedented control over their phone calls by integrating all existing phones and voicemail boxes into one through the GrandCentral number. GrandCentral has developed the most comprehensive feature set available in the market today and works seamlessly across all existing telephone networks, systems and devices. The company is privately held and based in Fremont, CA. For more information on GrandCentral, or to sign up for a free account, go to www.grandcentral.com. Protect, control, personalize.
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