Other respected bloggers, notably PhoneBoy and Ken Camp have taken an exception to what Grand Central does, hanging their objections on the idea of it being an additional phone number, not providing commentary on it's merits and new features like call record and telemarketing spam filtering.
Maybe because I've had Webley for years, which was an additional phone number, and an 800 number no less, I'm a bit more sanguine on the subject. I mean, for 8 years I've used Webley and no one has had to call (or known) my 800 number existed. I used call forwarding to send my known number to webley and created my own find me/follow me on steroids that didn't mean I had to go check tons of voice mail.
While I agree having too many numbers can be a pain, Grand Central the last week has given me what I always liked about Webley, costs a lot less and is doing more. As time goes on, based on my meetings with GC founders Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet, I know that many of the objections will go away.
This is why they call it beta and why companies unveil at DEMO. My guess is just like Nokia has taken feedback on their NSeries from the bloggers, so too will GrandCentral and make some changes that can turn around even PhoneBoy and others...
In my mind, other numbers are very helpful, especially if you want to do some really neat things that I know are possible. Over time watch those things happen and see how converging all these 2.0 ideas together makes Voice really different.
Hi Andy,
I use AT&T CallVantage and love it.
But some of GrandCentral's features -- recording calls, individual messages for voice mail -- are useful.
I wonder if GrandCentral would work if I (1) kept my CallVantage number but (2) had CallVantage forward calls to GrandCentral's number that would then (3) forward calls to my phones.
Would GrandCentral work and allow such features as call recording and individual voice mail messages or would CallVantage take over and negate GrandCentral? Hmmm.
Posted by: Alan Reiter | September 30, 2006 at 11:24 PM