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.
