If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

A few days ago I’ve offered a preview of this interesting news coming from GrandCentral and Gizmo.

Now that the news is official, I would like to add my two cents to those of other bloggers who already shared their thoughts.

First and foremost: Gizmo and GrandCentral are two great services. The former is the only real competitor of Skype, the latter is a great Voice 2.0 service I’ve already covered in this blog, which lets you manage your privacy 2.0 and interruption 2.0.

What do users get now that they are joining forces ?

Starting today GrandCentral customers can now designate their free Gizmo Project profile ID (which appears like a 747 area code number in their Gizmo profile) as one of their destination numbers which will ring on their personal computers or select next generation Nokia dual mode Nseries mobile phone or Internet Tablet, whenever a call comes into their GrandCentral number. This new GrandCentral feature also provides existing Gizmo users with the ability to receive calls for free directly from the traditional telephone network (PSTN) on their Gizmo enabled Nokia portable devices, Apple Macintosh and Windows PCs.

Since GrandCentral offers you a free PSTN number, it’s clear that a Gizmo user, if registered to GrandCentral, is now getting a FREE PSTN number (a PSTN number is worth about 30$ if bought by Gizmo).

Wise Alec Saunders underlines that it would have been great to have a full integration between Gizmo and Grand Central creating new valuable services rather than a “petty” call forwarding. Ok, I could agree, but what kind of new services ? On one side you have a great call handling platform, on the other side a widespread PC-based VoIP service. It’s pretty clear that the easiest integration is the same they did, which offers a real value added to final users.

Think of Sitofono and GrandCentral. The integration is pretty easy and at first sight there’s nothing so “special” there, but the value brought to customers is tangible (ask Andy…) and valuable. So, my conclusion is: congratulations Michael and Craig, I like this move. New, fresh, cool Voice 2.0 mashups are coming out and more will come pretty soon.

I’m sorry not to be at ETel next week (yes, unfortunately not), but I’ll look at it really carefully.

Technorati Tags: alec saunders, andy abramson, gizmo, grandcentral, luca filigheddu, sitofono, voice 2.0