Google to buy Grand Central
Search giant Google is in the final stages of negotiating a deal to purchase Grand Central. The purveyors of "One Number for Life" will soon find themselves under the warm and protective Google umbrella. Grand Central is an innovative service that provides users with a single phone number that can route calls to multiple different phone lines, giving you single number access to a land line, cell phone, business phone, and more. It also provides email delivery of MP3-encoded voice mail messages, among many other things. This appears to be a smart move on Google’s part, further enabling the company to pursue world domination, supreme wealth, and king of the hill status. There’s no word on how much GC will end up fetching (though $50 million seems to be on the tip of their tongues), if there will be material change to GC’s services, or anything else for that matter. It will be very interesting to see how things proceed over the next few months.
I’ve been trying this service for about a month. It’s great for forwarding your home phone into it and then having it weed out telemarketers (you can set the service to prompt people for their names when the caller ID is unidentified).
Where I think the service falls down:
- Cell users cannot take advantage of mobile to mobile minutes using this service – everyone who calls (even if the incoming call is forwarded to a cell) has to pay their normal cell minutes.
- At one point there was a plan displayed on the Grandcentral site about charging per month for minutes — I’d be V-E-R-Y reluctant to adopt a system that charged me again for minutes (I already pay my cell carrier once).
- At present there’s no way to send an sms to this number –
Cool service – I’d have to see how they address these downfalls. As the service stands now there are too many pitfalls for me to use it truly as one number.
Google is taking over the world.
I wonder how long it will stay Beta under Google.
I’ve been using it too. It has been tremendously helpful in many ways. I also use Google Apps for your domain.
Some of the pros I see here:
- A Single inbox which combines both GAFYD e-mail, Google Talk VM, and Grand Central VM
- VoIP out of GTalk
- Routing – i.e. route calls to my phones OR to my Computer via Google Talk
I hope to see these features come about as part of the acquisition!
Very nice to see Google acquiring this company. We must all realize that Google has the capital to make a company a lot better for the users. If it was MSN or similar then I would be upset. I just did a lot of reading on GrandCentral and it seems that it has a lot of potential in which Google is capable of facilitating.
I do not know if it is improper, but if someone could send me a beta invite that would be great: sir.wood @ gmail.com
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