Grand Central is giving away free phone numbers again

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Grand Central is giving away free phone numbers again

Friday, February 29, 2008 1:12 PM | Technology

grandcentral.com

Grand Central (from Google) is giving away free phone numbers again!

Grand Central is a free service that let you create a new phone number that can be forwarded to your real number. Always wanted a number in another city? Then get your grand central number today.

Grand Central has many great features and is perfect to keep your personal phone number private. You can have your grand central number call more than one number too.

Best of all it's 100% FREE!

Features include

Screen Callers
Know who's calling and screen unknown callers

ListenIn
Hear why someone is calling before taking the call

Call Record
Record calls on the fly and access recordings online

Block Callers
Unwanted callers won't be able to reach you anymore

Notifications
Receive voicemail notifications via email or SMS

Ring Different Phones
One number that rings different phones based on who's calling

Greetings
Personalize your voicemail greetings by caller or group

RingShare
Go beyond the ring and choose ringback tones for your callers

WebCall Button
Let people call you from a web page without showing your number

CallSwitch
Switch phones in the middle of a call

Click2Call
Call from your address book and save your typing

Mobile Access
Visual voicemail for your mobile phone

I live in a small town with no numbers available, however I did secure a number in a town just down the road from me.

Google comes up with so many great things and Grand Central is now one of my favorites!

6 Comments

Comments

Posted by Joe on 3/16/2008 9:56 AM: Allen,

I'm really happy to find out about this. I checked it out and it seems like a great service. What I'm curious about, however, is where it says that its free...

I had privatephone.com for about a year which I thought was great (not nearly as good as this) and all of a sudden they sold the company and started charging for it. I had given it to all sorts of friends and business contacts and then had to go changing numbers again because I wasn't about to pay for it.

Thanks for any additional info.
Posted by allen on 3/16/2008 10:28 AM: Hi Joe,
Google generally keeps things free if it is offered free. Not sure if the server is a philanthropic gift or if they will try to monetize it later. I don't seeing it go to a pay for service. The server has been around for a while, they just recently opened it up new users.
Posted by Joe on 3/16/2008 12:17 PM: Thanks for the quick reply Allen.

Just to let folks know, its in the invitation only stage right now; you go register and they're going to pick some random folks to send invites to.
Posted by Allen on 3/16/2008 12:18 PM: Hi Joe,
Hmmm I went the day I posted it and signed right up. Maybe the got low on numbers so they had to back to a private beta till they stock back up. Thanks for the update.
Posted by David VanAmburg on 4/2/2008 4:07 PM: Alan, the GrandCentral site still states that an interested person must "receive an invite from GrandCentral or a GrandCentral user to sign up". I'd love the opportunity to test their service now, rather than later. Since you successfully signed up, do you have the ability to share invitations with others, and is that something you would do with your blog readers you don't personally know, like me? Thanks for your consideration.
Posted by allen on 4/2/2008 4:20 PM: Hey David,
Let me login and see if I can, if so I will be glad to do that for you. I will email you either way.