Official: Google Acquires GrandCentral

By admin July 2nd, 2007

Google’s acquisition of GrandCentral, which we reported on last week, was officially announced on their blog today. GrandCentral is a telephony startup which lets you use a single phone number and voicemail box for all your phones.

This acquisition will bring Google into the telephony market and perhaps lead to greater integration with some of their other products. The technology, Google claims, will be moved to their infrastructure while current users will continue to have ‘uninterrupted service.’

It isn’t clear whether Google plans to keep the GrandCentral service going indefinitely (like YouTube) or attach their own piece of branding to it like most of their other acquisitions. Also, the price wasn’t disclosed, but is estimated to be somewhere in the early tens of millions.

Allen Stern from CenterNetworks has a good interview with its founder Craig Walker from back in September last year, right after their initial launch.

Erik

Has anyone tried this service out? I have a couple of numbers between home and cellphone and I’ll be doubling that for awhile with new home and cell numbers in Toronto as part of a move. It sounds like it would be great to have just one phone to carry and one number to give out.
Brandon Bean

I haven’t, I only have one phone number. I really want to hear what someone thinks about it though.
http://www.rev2.org/ Sid Yadav

If only I lived in the U.S… Although, I’m sure Google’s gonna make it awesome, free, and international soon, right?
http://www.islamcrunch.com/ Mikael Pittam

Erik, I am an early GrandCentral user (since their pre-Google beta days). I really love the service. The coolest feature: you can listen to the caller as they are leaving a voice message. If you feel you want to jump in and talk you can do so. Or just hang up or allow them to finish leaving the message.

Another handy feature: the system will ask the caller to recite his/her name. So when you pick up the call, you will hear “You have a call from John Malone”. You can take the call if you recognize the name or just hang up. Telemarketers usually don’t leave a name so you will hear “You have a call from ____________” Click. Or you might hear white noise from the background sounds. Click.

I highly recommend it. There are other great features like digital voice messages.
semwhy

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