Grand Central Goes Gizmo
I realize I’m a little late to this party. I also realized at least a half a dozen bloggers I read have already written about this, but I guess it’s my turn.
So here’s the deal: Grand Central, which provides one-number reachability and awesome call filtering capabilities, now provides the ability to have calls sent to your Gizmo Project account–over SIP. What does this mean? It means a couple of things:
- If you’re a Gizmo Project user, you’ve just been given a free telephone number for your account. Gizmo Project charges $35 a year for that. Grand Central gives you a number for free. And you get all that cool call control stuff to boot. What’s not to like about that?
- Your Grand Central number is no longer tied to the PSTN. You can now use Grand Central with anything with a SIP stack that is able to register to the Gizmo Project servers. Of course, Gizmo Project has clients for Mac, Windows, Linux (which they finally updated to 2.0 in the last week or so), the Nokia N770 and N800 tablets, and of course the Nokia N80 Internet Edition phone.
- You’re also no longer limited to 6 endpoints to call. Because Gizmo Project lets you register multiple endpoints, you can now be rang on more than 6 devices at once. Why you’d have that many registered at once is an entirely different question, but it makes it possible.
When I talked with Grand Central CEO Craig Walker earlier this week, he reminded me that, at first, I was originally down on the whole idea of Grand Central. For sure, I was. Then I began to actually use it and I realized how simple and powerful it is. I became a fan.
And now with this integration with Gizmo Project, that breaks down yet one more barrier. And that’s what every service should strive to do–make it exceedingly easy to adopt their service.
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Comment by Marc
I’m sure if someone wanted to tinker with Asterisk/trixbox,
they could chip away at GrandCentral’s appeal as well.
(Thanks for the Fritzbox info, by the way).
I suggested to GC (back in 12/06) to allow GC users to ’stamp’
all forwarded calls with a Caller ID # (of our own choice)
to fully exploit certain cellular carrier’s ‘MOC number’
features to the Nth degree. GC met my request half-way
and currently allows CallerID to either ‘pass through’ unaltered
or to be ‘relabeled’ with ones GC number.
At least ALL my INCOMING CALLS are now FREE with my cell plan.
If I were able to enter MY OWN choice of # for the CallerID
(to be labelled) I would use my SkypeIN number -
that way, all incoming would still be free for me,
but also my OUTBOUND CALLS would also be FREE,
by using TumaraXS and my SkypeIN number to access my SkypeOUT unlimited US & Canada minutes
(Granted, I have to have Skype running and logged in on my PC to make use of TumaraXS in this scenario)
Comment by Marc
Also worth noting -
you can forward your GrandCentral calls to your
SkypeIN number, but there’s a catch -
With a SkypeIN number, you get Voicemail for free.
That’s swell and all, but we GrandCentral users
have no use for Skype’s voicemail really.
So, we turn it off – or at least we try to!
Unless you have your Skype(IN) Account logged-in
and running, Skype does not acknowledge your Voicemail
(on/off) setting preference. What that means is that
even if you have ‘deactivated’ your Skype Voicemail
(if your Skype account IS NOT ‘online’)
any GrandCentral calls forwarded to your SkypeIN #
will be sent to Skype Voicemail – almost immediately.
So much for trying to answer that call via your cell
or having the call go to GrandCentral voicemail.
Silly Skype!
Hopefully, this ‘auto-on voicemail failover’ attribute
is not present in Gizmo – is it?
Another problem I’ve run-up against is the ’system status’
of the number you are forwarding your GC # to.
For example, you have your GC # forwarded to your
VOIP-based #, your cell #, and your landline #.
If your VOIP # or cell provider’s system is down for
some reason, that ‘down’ system will prematurely ‘take’
the GC-forwarded call and greet the caller with
“the cellular caller is not available,”
a fast busy signal, or “all circuits are busy” -
they won’t be offered to leave a message on the
GC-provided voicemail. This has happened to me in both
cell and VOIP cases. I’m not sure how this can be
dealt with really, other than to not have your GC
calls forwarded to ‘possibly unreliable’ numbers, I guess.