David Pogue gushes over new web service Grand Central which apparently will unify your phones. Tim O'Reilly then gushes over Pogue's gushing.
I haven't tried it but apparently Grand Central gives you a new unified phone number which you have to get all your friends and acquaintances to use. You tell them about all of your phone numbers. When your new "one number to rule them all" is dialed, all your phones ring. Or you can go through and configure what you want to happen. It does caller id so it can tell you who's calling and you configure specific things to happen for specific callers. Your children, spouse, friends, co-workers, parents, third cousins twice removed can all hear different songs playing instead of rings while waiting for you to pick up one of the cacophony of phones ringing because they called you.
Pogue says "Millions of people have more than one phone number these days — home, work, cellular, hotel room, vacation home, yacht". First off the yacht crowd really isn't a broad target market. After that people have a cell phone, maybe a work number and maybe a home number. Hotel phones are used to call other hotel phones. If you call out on them they charge you a fortune and you arrived too late at night to give the number to anyone else. And anyone else you've given the number to, already has your cell phone number and is using it because it's preprogrammed in their cellphone's memory.
Seriously, I think the cell phone has already made this product obsolete. I know many people who have no home number. If I want to reach them I call their cell. If you've got the desk job you have a work number too, but if your co-workers or customers really need to reach you, you give them your cell phone number. From my experiences contractors like electricians and Verizon tech people live by the cell phone on the job.
In the early 90s I worked on a industry standard networking platform called DCE. While you could use it to write your own networking applications, it included a distributed file system that meant that whatever workstation you were using (wherever it was), you could still get to your home machine's files. In the late 90s I realized the laptop mostly made all of that obsolete. The important networking standards weren't how to find your files from a strange computer or how to find the same programs that worked on this different kind of computer. The important ones were how did you connect your portable computer, with all your stuff on it, to the network from this new place (DHCP) securely because you can't trust the network (SSL, VPN).
Pogue lists many of the wonder features, but I think my cell phone already does them:
Caller Naming - yep, caller id and my phone shows my friends picture on the outside, without me having to open the phone
Listen In - you can listen to the message your friend is leaving while they leave it. Um if you want to hear it, talk to them. If you want to wait, wait. And if you're under 30, they're probably texting you anyway.
Record the call - because all those calls are so important they need to be saved
Ringback music - um yeah.
Customized Greetings - oh however many will I make?
Switch Lines - you can change to a different phone during a call and the caller never knows, that is until you drop one of the phones you're juggling. Does anyone need this?
Phone Spam Filters - I have an unlisted number and am in the Do Not Call Registry, I don't get telemarketing calls. Except from the Fraternal Order of State Firefighters, they won't leave me alone. I do get wrong numbers sometimes, and I don't see Grand Central offering anything new on that.
They do seem to do some neat things with voice mail but I think voip and call forwarding can do it too. I love voice dialing on my cell phone, I don't see that as a service they can offer without making it just a little too slow to use (first call grand central then call who you want).
I must be missing something because all these industry luminaries think Grand Central is a good idea. Can someone explain to me why the cell phone doesn't make it obsolete?
2 comments:
Also not terribly useful for families. What happens when I want to reach my wife, from the office, and my office and cell phone start ringing? Forget all this...what I want is for my wife to have a cell that electrically shocks her whenever I call, and her phone is in her purse and she doesn't hear it.
My ATT CallVantage home setup, paired with my BBerry, is the ultimate call screener, I think. Someone calls during dinner, and we ignore it. Person leaves a vMail, which cues an email to be sent to me. So a minute or two after the phone rings I can grab the BBerry and say, "oh, it was your mother calling again. Pass the rice, please?" Never had to get up.
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