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For those asking themselves what’s going on at GrandCentral, the “one number for life” service acquired by Google last year, today Google announces Vocito, a desktop UI for GrandCentral and, this time, for Mac users only.

It’s basically an apple script which integrates into Address Book or the popular launcher Quicksilver. In general, any application which supports the “tel:” URLs can be used with Vocito.

I installed it and as soon as I try to make a call from my Mac Address Book, I’m requested to insert my GrandCentral userid and password.  At that point, nothing happened (and no error messages), but it’s probably because I tried to call an italian number… The behavior should be the following: it calls my GC number and the remote number and connect them together.

I’ll check it out again to see how it really works. Finally something new from GrandCentral. You can download it at this link.

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Technorati Tags: Address Book, call, Google, GrandCentral, luca filigheddu, vocito

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During ITExpo I had a very interesting chat with John Nahm, CEO of PhoneVite. John and his partners are former managers of Dialpad, the company sold to Yahoo a few years ago. It seems Dialpad has been a great source of bright minds in VoIP, since also Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet, co-founders of Dialpad, sold their latest service GrandCentral to Google a couple of months ago.

That said, John showed me how PhoneVite works and I was really impressed. It’s very simple, but the number of potential applications for that service is huge. Birthday reminders, alarms, alerts and so on. In the web version, you can create your “phonevite” very easily, select a group of recipients, then you get a call from the system through which you can record your message from your phone on the fly.

Another way to create a “phonevite” is straight from your phone (PhoneVite To Go) through a dial in number without the need of using the web version. This is very useful since certain types of professionals who are working on field (think of firemen or doctors, for example) can quickly send an instant alert to a big group of people.

Last but not least, they have a widget for Facebook or iGoogle to make the creation of a phonevite even easier.

The first time you sign up you have to perform a process to verify your phone number. This way any outgoing call will be made showing your caller ID, something which will make any call familiar for your recipients. It’s also useful to authenticate you when using the PhoneVite To Go service.

John mentioned some interesting ways to use this service. Think of a call from your son’s school informing you that your son is not really attening the class today… Think of a call which starts automatically as the lesson starts… Bad for your son! He also told me that recipients can give their feedback on whether or not a certain call was appropriate, a good way to discover suspicious usages of the service (that is disturbing marketing calls)

Up to 25 calls, PhoneVite is free, then you pay 0,05 per call (no per minute charges are applied), for US and Canada users only. Then they offer some very cheap packages, shown below:

In conclusion, another services aimed to solve a well defined set of problems instead of using VoIP to make cheap calls only. There are many ways to use VoIP effectively and PhoneVite is definitely one of them. I bet some big names will look at PhoneVite carefully very soon. Prediction? Why not an integration with GrandCentral so that former collegues can finally work together again?

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Technorati Tags: alerts, Craig Walker, Google, GrandCentral, John Nahm, luca filigheddu, phonevite, Vincent Paquet