One single number, with free calls to your mobile phone? GrandCentral and Gizmo provide a solution

Today the big news is about the cooperation between GrandCentral and Gizmo to provide a solution to link a single phone number to a VoIP account, making it available for Nokia dual mode N series.

GrandCentral customers can now designate their free Gizmo Project profile ID as a 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.

Living in Europe I can read in the morning the collection of comments from authoritative writers in the US: Andy Abramson has collected all the best articles written on this topic.

The only point of view which presents some critics is from Alec Saunders, and for this reason I'd like to quote him:

[...] the market seems to have rejected single number reach as the solution. That’s why this announcement is so frustrating.

What would have been really exciting is to have seen Grand Central integrated with the Gizmo / SipPhone experience, rather than yet another peering agreement. Imagine accessing all of the Grand Central capabilities from within the SIPPhone universe, rather than handing calls from Grand Central off to the SIPPhone network. Imagine a world where callers to my Gizmo identity reached the GC feature set as part of the Gizmo experience.

I wouldn’t want you to think I’m singling out Grand Central and Gizmo for special treatment, by the way. They’re simply guilty of being locked into the same full-on Carrier 1.0 tunnel vision view of the world that is true of virtually every other carrier and VoIP player on the planet, from Verizon all the way to Vonage. Very few companies, excepting Skype and AOL, understand that there is an opportunity in leveraging the creativity of 3rd party developers to bring new capabilities to the telephony platform.

That’s the unrealized potential of VoIP.

We'll see in the future if this potential of VoIP will become reality; what is sure now is that all the VoIP services applying charges for inbound calls (SkypeIn included) are facing a new, tough competitor.

Technorati Tags: Giacomo Vacca, GrandCentral, Gizmo Project, Nokia, Alec Saunders, Andy Abramson