The Inspiration for GrandCentral Was Business Travel

A couple of years ago, Grand Central CEO Craig Walker stepped off a five hour flight and spent the next half hour checking voice mail messages. He had to call three separate numbers just to find out who all was trying to get hold of him while he was in the air. He decided that he wanted an easier way to keep track of missed calls, so he started GrandCentral.

Basically, GrandCentral is a friendly Web-based service that takes all of your existing phone numbers, organizes them, and gives your friends, family and professional contacts one phone number to call. Your voice mail is accessible from your phone and from your browser. You can even set it up to give different voicemail greetings to different contact sets, so your friends can leave a message for laid-back, casual you, while your colleagues get a crisp, professional greeting.

Additionally, the software allows all calls to be forwarded to a temporary number, so if your cell phone happens to get lousy reception at the Holiday Inn & Suites in Boise, you can temporarily forward all of your calls to the room phone.

Grand Central also offers some robust filtering features. If your annoying ex-girlfriend keeps calling, you can tell the software to give her a “this number has been disconnected or is no longer in service” message. If a telemarketer keeps pestering you about vinyl siding, you can flag his number as spam and never have to take a call from him again. Of course, it would be a bad idea to do this to creditors.

GrandCentral offers two levels of service. A free public beta and a $10.00/month service that allows more granular features and longer saving of existing voice mail messages.

The biggest drawback I saw in the software was the lack of ability to easily import an existing number to make it all-access. I’d like to take my existing home number and make it my GrandCentral number so that I don’t have to make new business cards and tell all my friends that I have a new phone number. That would be really annoying. Walker told me that this problem should be solved by this summer, and that making a phone number from another service portable is possible, but currently a little complicated.

For those of you who are worried about trusting such an important part of your lives to a startup that’s still in public beta mode, keep in mind that they raised $4m in venture capital from Halsey Minor and are likely to get a second round of funding. Hopefully, that means they’ll be around for a while.