Some of you may recall that I somewhat panned GrandCentral when some others were really outspoken about hopw great they thought it was. As a followup, I've been in touch with founder Craig Walker, and I've done some mroe testnig and evaluating. I really wanted to gvie GrandCentral a fair shake in formulating my thoughts. I've done that with others, and will continue to strive for fairness in my opinions, whether they're favorable or critical.

Let me start with this note from the GrandCentral blog

What do John Chambers, Meg Whitman, and Craig Walker have in common?

They’ve all been recognized as one of the Top 100 Voices of IP Communications. John Chambers of Cisco, Meg Whitman of eBay/Skype, and our own fiery leader, Craig Walker, share the list with an esteemed group of CEOs, government leaders, and innovators in internet telephony.

Congrats to Craig for the recognition. While I still have some mixed feelings about GrandCentral's solution, those are my issues and my needs. Don't let them detract from the great work Craig and this team are doing.

I'd expected to see some announcements this morning from GrandCentral that I haven't seen anywhere, so if I spill the beans on anything, it's simply confusion. I just really wanted to take a little time to dig deeper into what they do and how it works in sort of a blow by blow fashion.

What’s New in GrandCentral
Based on early beta feedback, here are some improvements Grand Central made so far:

• Don’t Screen: By default, GrandCentral asks unknown callers for their name before we connect a call. Now it’s optional – turn the screening feature on or off.
• Always Screen: You can also select to screen calls from certain numbers every time they call. Particularly useful when you receive calls from a number that is shared by many people or whenreceiving calls from a company with a shared outbound line.
• More Ways to Deal with Phone Spam: Flag a caller as SPAM and they’ll go directly to the SPAMvoicemail folder and not ring any of your phones or you can block them completely with a“number not in service” message. Your choice.
• More Import Contacts Options: Import your existing contacts from Outlook or Outlook Express, Gmail, Yahoo, vCards, and CSV files.
• Export Contacts Options: Since your GrandCentral address book can grow with virtually every call you receive, its now easy for you to export your address book to any application.

I'll talk more about specific features farther on here.

What’s Coming Next
These have been shared as features coming soon and I'm sure we'll all be seeing mroe announcements about them in the next few weeks.

• SIP Connectivity: Be able to receive calls anywhere in the world at no cost by taking them on an existing SIP-enabled client.
• International Forwarding: Add an international number as a forwarding number and get your calls anywhere you roam (usage fees will apply).
• International Phone Numbers: Sign up for a European phone number or add one to an existing account. We’ll treat it just like any other number (additional fees will apply).

Of these, only the SIP connectivity interests me, but I do very little international travel. That's probably one reason I find the whole concept of somewhat limited value to me personally.

So here are the basic GrandCentral value bullets, with my thoughts on each. As we work through this blow-by-blow, keep in mind that I come at telephony services from the angle of a baby boomer busines enterprise mindset. As a demographic, things that excite GenX are often a yawner for me from an enterprise perspective. That's not meant to undermine the innovation involved or the ingenuity of the folks at GrandCentral in any way. They've done some very cool stuff.

Have ONE NUMBER for everybody to reach you - Answer your calls from anywhere (cell, work, home) using a single number that will never change

This remains intriguing, but not a high value point for me. I use disposable phone numbers freely, just like email addresses. When I originally commented on GrandCentral I think I said I had 9 phone numbers. Today I have 14. I'm becoming a bigger fan of multiple numbers...think virtual numbers. The single number itself doesn't excite me, but the ability to ring that number on multiple phones does. For me to use it effectively I'd have to forward multiple phones to my GrandCentral number, then have GrandCentral do a lot of redirecting those calls, often back to the same number. The return on effort doesn't work well for me, but perhaps over time it will.

Access your voicemail by phone, email, or online - Plus, we’ll store your messages online for life (if paid, otherwise for 30 days)

To me, this is me too for voice mail. If you want and need consolidated voice mail, it's a nice solution, but I don't see it as terribly new or exciting. Voice mail is voice mail. See my post The Future - Some Thoughts on Voice 2.0 - Presence, Availability, and putting the pieces together for thoughts on how to effectively kill voice mail jail.

Treat every caller differently - Choose which phones ring, which voicemail greetings are played, and the
ringback tone, all based on who is calling

This is interesting, but I don't really want 6 different phones to ring when I get a call. I actually don't want 6 phones. I want one with virtual numbering, like TalkPlus will provide. If all my virtual numbers ring on a single device, I think the value of GrandCentral to me declines. In today's environment, make no mistake, it's pretty cool. Then again, in today's environment, people who need to reach me live already know which number to dial to do so.

ListenInTM on voicemail in real-time - Listen to your voicemail messages as they are being recorded from any phone and press STAR to join the call if important

I really like this feature. I like it a lot. But I also note that every single voice mail service could provide this feature in integrate fashion if they wanted to. Mobile carriers could implement this and yank the rug out to a large degree.So while I think it's very cool at the moment, I think it will become a more common feature. It's already available in many systems.

Create custom voicemail greetings - Record custom voicemail greetings for groups of callers (Friends, Family, Work, or Others) or for any (or every) contact in your Address Book

How many different ways to I need to say "This is Ken. Leave a message." really? I guess there's some neat reasons for this that just don't apply to me. Useful for people who leave silly messages on their home answer machine but worry about offending their boss.

Always know who’s calling, even “unknown” callers - Choose to have unknown callers screened and you’ll always know who’s calling (ListenIn™ even lets you know why)

I do like this feature. If you really aren't clear on how it works, call my Grand Central number, 360-545-4050. You'll be prompted to say who you are. When GrandCentral puts the call through to me, it will tell me who's calling. And if I don't know you, I won't answer. Feel free to try if you like.

Switch phones in the middle of a call - Just press the STAR key to switch a call from one phone to another (i.e. cell to desk, home to cell, etc.) regardless of provider, network or device

Perhas the single neatest feature today. Then again, if Voice 2.0 can put all my calls to a single device, how often will I need it? The future of being able to switch both a call and multimedia streams will make this more valuable. If I can swing a call from my cell phone to a video softphone on my laptop in the future, that will be very useful. I also think it will be a fairly standard converged feature in the voice and video 2.0 future world.

Upload your own MP3s as ringback tones with RingShare™ - Customize your ringback tones with your own MP3s to show some personality to your callers while they’re waiting for you to answer

Ok, this just doesn't excite me in any way, And I don't really appreciate people playing their musical favorites in my ear when I call either. I know ringtones and ringback tones are very hot in the right markets. I'm not that market at all. I can see business use for playing back MP3 informational messages rather than music, but I wonder how useful they're really going to be, As a caller, I think I'd view them and a new form of spam myself.

Record any call at any time with the press of a button - Press 4 to record a call, when you answer or anytime during the call. To stop recording at any time, just press 4 again. We’ll save it for you online.

I like this feature, but haven't really used it. I think more and more we'll want to record conversations. The ability to do so with a service through the network simplifies the process for users. I wonder how easily the carriers could implement this and pull the value rug out from under the GrandCentral solution. Perhaps more important, would they? There's probably nothing in it for them, so they won't see it as a threat. Thumbs up to this feature.

Block annoying callers and telemarketers - Flag any caller as SPAM and send them directly to the SPAM voicemail folder or play them “this number not in service” to keep them from bugging you

Just isn't a real problem for me. There's a do not call list for telemarketers, I expect it will carry through to SIP URIs at some point. Some will follow it and some won't. For me, this isn't a big problem today and I don't use the feature myself.

Create short-term settings with Quick Rules - Temporarily turn on Do Not Disturb and forward all of your calls to voicemail, or add a temporary location (i.e. vacation rental) as a forwarding number

Smacksof relevance engine settings. I'd rather something like iotum handle this for me 24X7 than have some settings I need to manipulate. I'm sure it's useful for many folks, just not terribly interesting to me.

Click2Call and leave the dialing to us - Return a call from your Inbox or call anybody in your Address Book with the click of a button. Outbound dialing rates apply.

Click2Call in general doesn't excite me. It's an easy to implement feature that will exist in everything in two years. Half of the implementations won't work. GrandCentral's does, but since I'm never sitting parked on my GrandCentral inbox, and don't ever want to be, it's a feature I won't use. I can click to call from Outlook easily enough,

Inbound minutes - Use GrandCentral to handle all of your inbound calls. There’s no limit on minutes, so give out your GrandCentral number to everybody.

I don't pay inbound minutes on PSTN numbers, Skype numbers, etc. I only pay minutes on my mobile. In the use I get a gazillion minutes for a fixed rate. Minutes are a micropayment transaction in a race to the bottom. This is just reality to me.

Do I Like it, or Not?
Good question. GrandCentral has implemented some great Voice 2.0 features. They've enhanced the functinoality of the network to be sure. They've layered on things that don't exist in consolidated fashion today. I absolutely salute their creativity and ingenuity.

I'm not sure I see broad sustainability across the set of features. I think many could easily be killed by carriers and other service providers. Whether those organizations will feel a motivation to do so remains to be seen. I suspect not in most cases. Not immediately, although two years from now will be a very different Voice 2.0 landscape.

For me personally? The jury's still out. I'm determined to exercise the features fully and make a decision for the long term. If I were to make it today, I wouldn't use GrandCentral. Ask me again in 3 months. Better still, watch to see what I have to say about it down the road. I'm not abandoning GrandCentral. But if I did, there'd be negligible impact in terms of productivity loss or how I manage my telephony life. Perhaps my addiction will grow as I incorporate the features more into my daily routine.


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