My last post discussed using call forwarding on Skype as a method for having one phone number that rings all your phones (e.g., home, office, and cell) simultaneously (with obvious applications for remote phone reference service). Well, GrandCentral, a Web 2.0 startup, is offering the same convenience, along with a host of other novel features, including centralized voicemail, the ability to switch between phones in the middle of a call, customized outgoing messages for different types of callers, spam filters for telemarketers, and the ability to listen in live as callers leave a voicemail message and the option to pick up the call at anytime during the recording.

GrandCentral got a big boost last Thursday when David Pogue published a story about the service in the New York Times. Pogue does a better job explaining the features of the service than the company's website:

From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uninumber, all of your phones ring simultaneously, like something out of “The Lawnmower Man.”

No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you’re home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.

As a bonus, all messages now land in a single voice mail box. You can listen to them in any of three ways. First, you can dial in from any phone (a text message arrives on your cellphone to let you know when you have voice mail). If you call in from your cellphone, you don’t even have to enter your password first.[...]

All of this, incredibly, is free if you have only two phone numbers to consolidate. A premium plan, at $15 a month, offers more of everything: up to six phone numbers unified, voice messages preserved forever instead of for 30 days, and so on, along with a Web site free of ads.

In my post on Skype, I fretted over the likelihood that my office or cell's voicemail would pick up the call before Skype's centralized message service could kick in. GrandCentral has actually solved that problem. While callers hear the traditional ringing sound, you are met with a menu of choices when you pick up (take call, send to voicemail, send to voicemail and listen, etc.), and your phone is not actually connected to the caller unless you choose to take the call. If you don't select an option within 15 seconds, the caller is automatically forwarded to your GrandCentral voicemail. Even if your cell voicemail picks up, the caller never hears it and no message gets left on your cell.

The biggest problem with GrandCentral? Getting people to actually call your new number, particularly in a work environment with short extensions and in-house phone directories.