I'm going to begin this post fulfilling a promise to my friend Om Malik. Tonight at ETel he laughingly said I owe him a public apology. So, Om, this is for you...when it came to the early call on GrandCentral, you were right my friend, and I was wrong. For those of you who don't understand that, I was less than enthusiastic about GrandCentral early on. That's changed and today I'm a big fan. To the point, my GrandCentral number is now the single phone number on my business cards.n Color me a fan...even an evangelist.

I get all the news briefs as they come out from a lot of folks. Today I got the press release from GrandCentral that's at the very bottom of this post. As luck and hard work would have it, I also has some time scheduled with Craig Walker today at the ETel conference. He spent quite some time with me, and we recorded our conversation as a podcast chat. I invite you to come listen in to my chat with Craig, but don't run off to quickly, because there's also a special video below.

Click To Play

GrandCentral New Feature Notes
GrandCentral has added a series of new features and functions to our award winning service. We've also found a useful way to blend GrandCentral with T-Mobile's Faves that is core to our mission to keeping the cost of phone services down, while offering more value to our customers.

Web Button
GrandCentral users can now create a button that can be easily embedded in any web page, allowing anyone to call them for free.

When someone clicks on the GrandCentral button, GrandCentral will call them, by connecting the call to the GrandCentral number.

All GrandCentral settings like selective ringing, custom greeting as well as Ringshare can be customized for that button.

Examples of the Web Button application include:

• eBay auction: GrandCentral button can send callers to a voicemail with a description of the item on sale. Callers can leave a message and the GrandCentral user can decide whom to call back.
• MySpace page: profile can let people calling without sharing GrandCentral user's phone number
• Blogger can let readers call to leave feedback. Messages can then be posted in the reply thread (see embed feature below)
• Web sites can let visitors call them easily
• Or just about anywhere the Web Button can be placed.

Embed Code
GrandCentral users can now share any voicemail they receive by just pasting the embed code provided on any web site.

Examples of application include:

• Personal web page with family messages
• Bloggers who want to share audio feedback as part of the comment thread
• Companies who want to post audio testimonials

New web interface
As the service is gearing towards post-beta, so is the web interface. We've redesigned the web interface to allow for even more intuitive navigation and added some functionality:

• Redesigned player
• Map now shows caller number location
• New Ringshare upload manager

T-Mobile Faves' Cost Saver
GrandCentral lets users choose in their settings if they want their GrandCentral calls to:

• forward the caller's Caller ID so they know who's calling or
• display their GrandCentral number so they know it's a GrandCentral call and they can pick up safely and have their call handling options

In the latter case, if the phone they take the call from is a T-Mobile cell phone and they have registered their GrandCentral number as one of their "Faves", then all incoming calls to their T-Mobile cell are now free, regardless of who the caller is.