This weekend I was able to get an invite (thanks Adam!) and try out Google’s recent acquisition, GrandCentral which is in private beta.
GrandCentral allows you to use one number to manage all your phones: home, cell, work, etc. The web interface allows you to manage greetings for each number, archive all voice mails indefinitely, setup notification preferences and many more options. There’s even a nifty phone spam option to filter out telemarketers and other unwanted calls. The basic idea is that if your work or home numbers change, you don’t need to update anyone because they would have your GrandCentral number.
Once you have an invite, signing up is very easy. You identify an area code and/or city and state, then GrandCentral provides you a list of 5 numbers. Pick one and then you associate your various phone numbers to the main GrandCentral number.Here are more GrandCentral screen shots, a pre-Google acquisition review from Om Malik and plenty of blog coverage on the acquisition by Google.
I have about 6 invites left, so if you’re interested, link to this post and I’ll randomly pick a few blogs from the trackbacks and/or comments to give out the invites.
