Everybody…although you haven’t heard as much from us in the past few months as you did before, we are working hard every day on the next great version of GrandCentral and a ton of cool new features. We can’t talk much about them until we launch, so apologize for the lack of updates on the blog. That said, we do want to stay in touch with you all and want you to know we are listening to your feedback and really shaping the next version around your requests. Keep them coming!

I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service.

Thanks for your patience with us and we’ll continue to work to make the service better by the day. - Craig Walker

We’ve had a lot of requests in the past to be able to have two accounts share a forwarding number.  There were a lot of internal reasons for not allowing this…however the voice of the user has been heard and we’re changing our policy to accommodate all of you who are married or otherwise share a home with another GrandCentral user.  Now you and your roommate, spouse, dog, etc., can both have the same home number ring when somebody calls either of those GrandCentral numbers.

There are a lot of new features in the works and we look forward to rolling them out quickly!  Stay tuned.

GrandCentral Users:

Vincent and I (and the rest of the GrandCentral team) wanted to wish you all a very Merry Christmas (or whatever else you may be celebrating). This has been a great year for the GrandCentral service and we have all of you to thank.

We also have been nominated as one of the 5 finalists of the Crunchies (TechCrunch’s user chosen annual award) in the “Best Overall” category. So feel free to hit the link below and vote for GrandCentral.

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Thanks again for all the great feedback you’ve given us in the past and we look forward to rolling out a bunch of new features and services shortly.

Happy New Year!

Craig

We were happy to wake up this morning to see that the Wall Street Journal had a good write up on GrandCentral in Walt Mossberg’s Personal Technology section. The story was mostly about customized voicemail and how simple GrandCentral was to use, which we’re really proud of and appreciate the coverage by Sarmad Ali. Another blogger caught our eye as well, this time from a smaller blog but one who clearly understood the GrandCentral features and gave a great description of them here. He even suggested that our “CallSwitch” feature should be called “PhoneSwitch”, and we agree. It’s great to see all the coverage from everybody the WSJ down to a personal blog.

This week marked the first year of the GrandCentral service! It was at last Demo Fall in San Diego that we launched GrandCentral. After 9 months of intense work and more than a few iterations of the website, we turned the switch and watched feverishly as the first sign ups started coming in. After some positive coverage from GigaOm, TechCrunch, Lifehacker and others, and a Digg front page, Craig and I got to do our first demo of the live site to the Demo attendees.

Thousands of demos later, we’re still as excited by the potential of the service and are working hard on bringing you new exciting features. So thank you to all our users who made GrandCentral what it is today, and happy birthday GrandCentral!

And if you do not have your GrandCentral number yet, click here to ask for an invite. We are sending invitations every day.

We posted a blog on the main Google blog before the latest Project Homeless Connect event in San Francisco but wanted to give a little more insight here as well now that the event is over. We’ve been attending these PHC events since April of last year and after each event we always come away with a great feeling of really helping somebody. We’ve blogged about it a bunch before, but it can’t be stated enough…to help people get off the streets and into jobs and housing, one of the most important things they need is a real, local telephone number. We’ve heard first hand stories about filling out job applications and having to leave the “phone number” field blank, with the sinking feeling that they would never get the job. Or about counselors who work with runaways and want to give them a number that they can leave messages for them or try to get their families to leave messages for them. At each of these PHC events the Project CARE (Communications and Respect for Everybody) booth is usually one of, if not the, most wanted services and we have always been really happy to be there and are very excited that Google not only wants to continue to support this effort but to expand it nationally. Again, a great program by Mayor Newsom and we’ll always be there to help.

We’ve been working over the last several days to take care of a problem affecting about 400 of our users — and we wanted to post here to reassure everyone that unless you’ve received email from us already, your account is not going to be affected. If you are one of the users that was affected, hopefully the explanation below will help you to understand how this happened:

FIRST, THE FACTS, AND WHAT HAPPENED:

(1) One of our smaller underlying carriers (which we had been using prior to the Google acquisition), which had been reliably providing similar services for years (and provided numbers and connectivity to lots of other providers)–sent us a notice that they’d be exiting certain markets and disconnecting some phone numbers in 30 days. This caught us by surprise and although we were not happy about this, there was no way we could stop them from doing this.

(2) We immediately began porting all of these numbers to a one of our larger carrier partners and we were able to get nearly all of these numbers ported successfully.

(3) Unfortunately, 434 phone numbers could not be ported over.

(4) Once we found this out, we immediately sent an email to these users letting them know that we had to change their numbers to another one in the same area code and we automatically added these numbers to their accounts. We provided a direct email link to help them with any issues or concerns they may have, let users choose alternative numbers more to their liking, and offered any other assistance that would help them.

HERE’S WHAT WE’RE DOING IN RESPONSE TO THIS:

(1) We’re doing everything we can to ensure that the carriers we’re now using, post-acquisition, are large, reliable, and committed to providing these services long term, and

(2) We’re working with these users to find them numbers they can be happy with and to explain the situation.

Although this affected only 15 of the local areas where we offer services (out of nearly 8,000), we take this matter seriously and have done everything to make the disruptions as limited as possible. If you are one of the affected users and have any issues that have not yet been resolved, feel free to email us at “service at grandcentral dot com” and we’ll do our best to resolve your issues.

Thanks,

Craig

One of the foundations of GrandCentral is the “one number for life” concept. When creating the company we thought about all the pain points of having a new phone number or a number that switches every time your life changes. Go to college? Get a new number. Buy a house? Get a new number. Change jobs? Get a new number. Not only is this a pain for you as you need to now memorize another number for yourself, but its even worse for your friends and family who have to keep up updating their address books to keep track of you. With GrandCentral as your only number, these problems go away.

We all experienced the value of this first hand last week when we moved offices from GrandCentral in Fremont to Google in Mt. View. Everybody was given a new phone (and phone number) on our desks when we moved in. All I did was log into my GrandCentral account and delete my old work phone number and put in my new one. Immediately my desk phone began ringing when people called my GrandCentral number. Painless for me, and no need to send out updates to everybody I know with my new phone number.

What a week! It was only this Monday that we announced the acquisition of GrandCentral by Google and yet it already feels as if we’ve been part of Google for much longer than that. It was great to feel welcomed by everyone on the Google campus and the transition has been amazingly swift.

As we move GrandCentral over to Google’s network, we wanted to make sure that we can keep offering the service to as many new users as possible. So our first priority has been to start replying to the remarkable number of reservations we’ve received and we started sending out the first GrandCentral invitations yesterday. If you have reserved a number but have not yet received your invitation, please be patient as we will keep sending new batches of invitations on a regular basis.

Also, if you’re an existing user and have run out of invitations, we’re working on increasing the number of invitations. Thanks for your patience!