Showing posts with label Grandcentral. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grandcentral. Show all posts

Monday, November 19, 2007

Voxalot's Facebook application for really free phone calls

You know that I bashed Facebook very hard for being a terrible time sucker. Many Web 2.0 applications need too much attention, compared to their value. But there are some utilizations that make me smile, because the unleash the potential of Web 2.0 without wasting my precious time and money. Like Voxalot's latest Facebook application, VoxCall for Facebook, that really disrupts telecommunications. It let's me make free phone calls without touching the PSTN. Read the announcement:

On Monday 19th Nov 2007 Voxalot will be officially launching our new social communications application for Facebook called VoxCall.

VoxCall is an exciting new initiative from Voxalot that allows Facebook users to click on their friends and initiate phone calls. The beauty of VoxCall is that it is self-organising in that if your VoxCall friend changes their contact phone number, you don't even have to be notified... VoxCall will use whatever number they have registered.

VoxCall also offers both public and private chat rooms where VoxCall friends can get together for a group discussion.

The underlying technology that VoxCall uses to connect calls is Voice over IP addresses (often known as SIP URIs). When you add the VoxCall application, you will be prompted to enter your SIP URI. To ensure that you are the rightful owner of that number, VoxCall will display a PIN number on the screen and then call the number you entered. Your phone will ring and you will be prompted to enter the PIN, which is validated.

As such, VoxCall supports calls between friends that belong to *any* "open" voice network (not just Voxalot).

The beauty is that VoxCall uses VoIP without touching the PSTN. My buddies just enter their SIP URI and I can call them with just one click in Facebook. When they change their SIP address I don't have to bother to update my data since their Facebook button stays the same. We stay connected for free from SIP to SIP.

I find this much more nifty than the Facebook apps from Jajah, Jangl, Jaxtr, Rebtel, IVR Technologies, iotum, Sitófono or Grandcentral. They also connect people on Facebook and let them call me for free, in most cases. But there is always a telephone number involved, so that someone has to pay an incumbent telco which provides them.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Who wants and invitation to GrandCentral?

Since Luca says that a similar offer turned out to be one of his most popular blog posts ever, I will also give it a try: Who wants an invitation to Google's GrandCentral? I still have some to give.

The proceeding is the same that we followed with the invitations to Joost: The person who wants a GrandCentral invitation from me should just ask in the comment section of this blog and tell me why I should choose especially him or her.

Friday, July 27, 2007

My answer to Jeff Pulver's "Call for More Innovation in Voice Services"

Jeff Pulver and Ken Camp are bored from what they've seen in VoIP lately. That's why Jeff startet a "challenge for innovative disruptors with regards to the voice applications industry":
Think about presence and voice and instant messaging, take a look at the APIs of twitter and Facebook and pitch me on the service that you want to create. Those who get my attention might end up with the early-early seed capital needed to turn their dream into a reality.
So what could that be? Jeff doesn’t want to hear about a service that's simply a variation on Call Forwarding and/or Voicemail. It has to be something really different. Something cool. Something that truly helps to redefine communications.

I am really courious to see the winner of this competition. I don't know why Jeff is so excited about Twitter and Facebook. To me these applications are mostly a waste of time. But what I would love to have is a "Hosted Fring with Grandcentral's filter rules and international mobile callforward over GSM".

What does that mean?

I like Fring because it connects me with just one program to my contacts at Skype, MSN messenger and Google Talk. Lately it also works as a VoIP client. But only on my Nokia mobile phone!

Why isn't there a website that does the same like Fring? Why isn't Fring a hosted service? I would love to leave my login data for all these services on their website and connect to it over SIP from my ATA. A kind of Voxalot, but extended with Skype, MSN messenger and Google Talk.

Whenever somebody contacts me, my phone should ring. Outgoing calls to Skype, MSN, Google or phone numbers should also be made with my normal phone. The server would decide automatically how to connect the call, because it has call rules for that - like Voxalot has.

Incoming calls would be filtered like at Grandcentral. Annoying people could only leave a voicemail and good friends could ring my phone day and night.

This service should of course not only work over an ATA but also over the mobile phone network. Internationally! There are more and more international MVNOs slashing roaming charges and giving local fixed line numbers to mobile phones. This means they already have an own SIP infrastructure and GSM gateways in every country. If they can give me a local fixed line number in a country, they can also deliver cheaply the described calls from Skype, MSN, Google and my home VoIP providers over GSM.

Outgoing calls should be done the Nimbuzz way:
Call your IM buddies on their mobile or on their PC. At the cost of a local call, worldwide. No credits needed.
A small application on my mobile phone would always know which cheap number to call in every country to connect to the described network.

I am sure, that the despicted layout is possible. The guys at Fring, Grandcentral, Gtalk2VoIP, Skip2PBX and Roam4Free have already pieces of it in their hands.



More coverage about the challenge:

Andy Abramson, Jon Arnold, Pat Phelan, Aswath Rao, Alec Saunders, Russell Shaw and TIA Communities.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Google is the real telco disruptor

Now that Google goes "All In" and really takes up the fight for the 700 MHz wireless spectrum in the US we all wonder what are the plans of the search engine company. I found two pieces of well founded speculations that I like most. Both get to the point that Google is planning the total disruption of mobile and fixed line telephony by offering free calls, sponsored by advertising.

"GoogleTel" is arising out of the search engine's last moves and acquisitions. Thomas F. Anglero, one of my favourite VoIP bloggers but not the most frequent writer, puts it in the form of a equation:

GoogleTel = Ubiquisys (Femtocells)+ Bandwidth (Dark Fiber and 700MHz Spectrum) + Grand Central (One Number ID)
Sunday, July 22, 2007
It seems very obvious at this moment what Google is doing. They are building a US nationwide Telecom operator but without the Telecom legacy.
And Don Reisinger at CNet asks:

Could Google kill the cell phone industry?
July 20, 2007 11:08 AM PDT
Once the company announces the wireless broadband to the nation, it will immediately announce that Google Phone everyone has been talking about. The Google Phone will work specifically with the Google system (kind of like Skype) and will be free of charge. The only fee to the consumer is the cost of buying the phone [...] As soon as the phone is released, people will be tossing their iPhones, Razrs and every other cell phone into the nearest river. Why pay all that money for a phone when you can have the same kind of service for free?
Maybe Reisinger should have omitted the interrogation mark in his title? The two articles are highly convincing and should make traditional telcos shiver. Have fun reading and think twice before you sign your next long term contract!

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Why did Roam4Free meet with Google's GrandCentral?

What's going on between the international MVNO Roam4Free and Google's new acquisition Grandcentral?

Roam4Free's CEO Pat Phelan tells in his blog that he and Chief Commercial Officer Sean O’Mahony, recently hired from Jajah, met with Grandcentral's Craig Walker and the Google voice team at Google headquarters London.

Pat isn't allow to tell more because he is "under electronic NDA". Just two fotos and the sentence "What were we doing at the Googleplex, oh thats a secret".

This gives pretty much room for speculation. I guess they are planning to bring GrandCentral to other countries than the US and make it mobile. This is very necessary for GrandCentral and would match well with Roam4Free's latest strategy to give fixed line numbers from 28 countries to their users.

I like GrandCentral’s services but it sucks to have only a US number. So I have to make a call forward from a German number to my GrandCentral number. Therefore I loose GrandCentral’s call screening options and get a bad delay, since the call forward goes twice around the world.

That problem could be solved easily with some SIP configurations. If Roam4Free connected its SIP servers, Grand Central could directly offer local fixed line numbers from 28 countries. Also Roam4Free could help Grand Central users to make their cell phones ring at low cost in 115 countries, without high roaming charges.

Maybe Roam4Free is Google’s next acquisition. I don’t have any facts to sustain that, but wouldn't be surprised.

GrandCentral gives you "one inbox" for life, where all voice messages can be stored for ever. With Google's voice search capabilities these messages can soon be searchable in seconds, like the millions of emails that people have in their GMail accounts. It's even possible to merge GMail and GrandCentral into "one inbox for life for voice and emails". Given the fact that Google is a large international company with worldwide dark fiber capacities you would just have to add Roam4Free to make that work as a great international phone service in over 115 countries.

But they are not alone. Remember the last news "Skype Founding Investor invests in United Mobile to "deliver a combination of Truphone, Jajah and Skype". This can result in something quite similar, based on another international MVNO, United Mobile, and Skype's founding investor Morten Lund.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Google's GrandCentral now also in Germany

Google's GrandCentral ("One Number...for LifeTM - a number that's not tied to a phone or a location - but tied to you") now works also in Germany, with German numbers - if you can accept some shortcomings. I just checked it out.

Two days ago I got this email:
Good news! We are excited to announce that we are opening the GrandCentral private beta to some additional users and would like to extend you an invitation to sign up. To get started, just click on the invitation link below and register for your free GrandCentral phone number. Once you create an account, you will be able to invite up to 10 friends to also join our private beta and they will be able to sign up immediately.

http://www.grandcentral.com/home/invite/.........

Since the GrandCentral beta is still closed to the general public, you will need to click on this link to sign up. If you already have a GrandCentral account or you no longer wish to sign up, you can forward the link to a friend.

Thanks again for your interest in GrandCentral and enjoy the service!

Sincerely,
Craig Walker & Vincent Paque
Maybe that's because I applied some weeks ago. When first I entered my data on GrandCentral's website they wouldn't let me sign up. The process always sent me back to the first screen. But after some tweaking with proxies I finally got my own GrandCentral account as you can see here:



Just type in your US number an let my phone ring! You are welcome.

The next thing to do was to forward a local German VoIP number to my US GrandCentral number, which is located in Albany, NY. With this call forward I can do nearly everything that US GrandCentral users can do. And of course this call forward is free, because I use Voipcheap which provides free calls to the US.

When someone calls me, a computer voice asks me to choose from four options:
  • "1" to accept the call,
  • "2" to send it to voice mail
  • "3" to send it to voice mail and ListenIn. That's great to filter callers. If the message is intesting then I still pick up the phone and start a conversation.
  • "4" to accept the call and record it directly in GrandCentral. That's a great feature for me as a journalist who sometimes likes to have recordings of his interviews.
There are far more features, as you can see here, but I did not try them out yet.

The one thing that's obviously missing is to screen the callers and to filter spam calls by caller ID. Normally GrandCentral asks every caller to tell his name before it connects the call. But my forwarded calls have all the same caller ID from the number in Berlin. To GrandCentral it always seems to be the same caller and the computer voice always tells me that "Markus" is calling. That's a little bit annoying since I am the "Markus" who is alledgedly calling. Only people who call directly to my US GrandCentral number can be callscreened correctly.

One feature I really love is the free call forward from GrandCentral to Gizmo Project numbers, although I have critized it some months ago. It's a great and necessary feature since GrandCentral doesn't give SIP login data to its customers. Now I just forward for free from GrandCentral to a Gizmo number that's installed in my Fritz!Box ATA.

I even managed to forward GrandCentral calls for free over a GSM gateway to my cell phone. But that's crap. The computer voice asks me to type 1,2,3 or 4. But whatever I do it doesn't accept it. I suppose that GrandCentral relies only on DTMF touch tones and cannot understand my cell phones instructions. But why does it work with mobile phones in the US? Do they have touch tones?

I hope to learn more about GrandCentral in the next days and let it work like a virtual secretary who manages my phone calls. On Asterisk it would be possible to transmit the original caller ID over the call forward to GrandCentral, so that I could use also the call screening.

But then: Who needs GrandCentral if he or she has an own Asterisk server?

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Great VoIP overview in InformationWeek

I found another good article about the potential of VoIP. It deals with "numbers that ring where you are", "free calls . . . to the right people" and "anonymous calling for social networkers".
Review: 6 Skype Alternatives Offer New Services
In an effort to compete with the market leader, these VoIP services have come up with some interesting and useful features that may inspire you to switch.
By David DeJean
InformationWeek
Jul 3, 2007 12:00 AM
The featured companies are GrandCentral, TalkPlus, Jajah, Talkster, Jangl and Jaxtr. A good summary of what's possible today.

Monday, February 26, 2007

Why GrandCentral's Gizmo support is not such a big breaktrough to me

GigaOM tells some news that seem interesting at first sight:
GrandCentral, the single-phone-number Web-based service launched last fall, is adding support for the free Gizmo Project Internet VoIP service, which may open up a whole new way to decrease spending on international or long-distance calling.

Still in beta, the GrandCentral service is the latest entrant in the often-attempted “single phone number” scheme. The Fremont, Calif.-based startup uses a combination of VoIP technology and softswitch-based applications to give users ways to tie multiple phone numbers, services (voice mail, etc.) and devices to a single inbound number.
This news seems more like a good piece of Public Relation work than a technical breaktrought to me and I want to tell you why:

If we all would be using ENUM the deal between GrandCentral and Gizmo wouldn’t be big news. With ENUM I can already route my PSTN number to my Gizmo account. VoIP users that call this number and do an ENUM lookup can call me for free.
Why bother for another number from GrandCentral?
I can implement the same call routing features of GrandCentral in my analog telephony adapter (ATA). I actually do. So whenever somebody calls my years old PSTN number I can let it ring wherever I want (for instance on my Gizmo Project soft phone or my mobile phone) and I can also filter the callers like GrandCentral offers.
Why pay extra for a service which I can already use at no extra cost at home?
Well, some might say that ENUM is difficult or that they just don't know it. But the point is that it’s totally easy to do an ENUM lookup before every call. SNOM VoIP phones do it automatically before they start the call. The VoIP providers could do it automatically before the VoIP call starts. Also they could enlist all their numbers in ENUM. The client wouldn’t even notice that ENUM is working in the background. It would just be all over IP and for free. But the VoIP providers don’t do it because the earn very well not doing ENUM and charge for calls that technically could be for free.
Others say that we should at least give GrandCentral credit for is their rules processing.
Well, the newest versions of the Fritz!Box do this out of the box. No complicated acronyms needed for installation. Just some clicks in the browser.

Incoming calls can be treated individually. You can for instance block unwanted calls or pass them to an answering machine. Friends and business partners can be redirected to a mobile phone, even if the call signal of the phone that’s connected to the Fritz!Box is switched off.

I am using such a Fritz!Box at home. It’s connected between my old telephone and the DSL connection. So all my calls go for free or for very modest prices over the internet. I do the configuration in my browser and it’s very easy. You can see an example here.

In fact the Fritz!Box is an entire PBX and cost me only 30 Euros, because I bought it used. It can do everything that GrandCentral does. Even an ENUM lookup before every call. But this is a hidden function for which you have to tweak the Linux that runs on the box. The Fritz!Box is getting better and better with every firmware update.

So to me GrandCentral is no big news and no necessary service. But I am always courious about new stuff.