Grand Central (Work vs. Personal)

September 6th, 2007

While on vacation, I wrote about the Connectivity Curse. Part of that curse is my cell phone. I like the benefits of using my cell phone for work related calls during work hours, but inevitably the calls spill into personal time, like getting a call at 7:50am about the air conditioning not working, or a potential job interviewee calling me at 7pm. And there’s no way I could keep track of another cell phone just for work.

My first try at a solution was to get a Skype In number and have the calls forwarded to my cell, but skype just isn’t there yet for various reasons.

The solution that I’ll probably settle on is Grand Central. What’s not to love? It’s now a Google acquisition and FREE (unless you call via the web after beta is over, which is something I don’t mind paying for anyways). Thanks for the invite, Emmanuel. Two things that it needs for it to be functional: 1. The ability to turn on/off call forwarding based on a schedule, 2. The ability to receive/send text messages. Other issues would be the ability to send voicemail to different email addresses dependent on category (ie. work voicemail goes to work email & personal voicemail to personal email), and the ability to have more than one Grand Central number forwarding to my home phone. If it could do those two things, I’d use this service as my ONLY contact number for everyone. If you want to try it out, let me know, I got invites!