According to TechCrunch,
Google is in acquisition discussions with telephone management startup GrandCentral we’ve learned, and we have a high degree of confidence that the deal has actually been closed.
I am still a big fan of what GrandCentral can do to help me prioritize and schedule my phone interruptions. GrandCentral is an all-in-one telephone number that rings all of your phones at once (or none at all) depending on how you have configured it. Family calls ring my home phone, work phone, and cell phone simultaneously. Work calls don't ring at home unless I reconfigure them to. Calls from people I don't know, or haven't told GrandCentral about get screened and are treated as a work call until I decide how I'd like to handle the call in the future. I take and make a lot of phone calls most days, so having my phone number help by categorizing them first is a big help. It give me back some time, which I hope I'll use more profitably if I can use it in a planned manner.
If you're serious about increasing your productivity, then you have to be serious about scheduling and minimizing your interruptions. GrandCentral lets you create rules for answering your phone before someone calls so that your calls will be handled the way you want, when they call.
By the way, GrandCentral is also fun. They have made it ridiculously easy to create custom ringback tones for your callers. You can use one tone for all, use different tones by groups, or even upload tones for each individual caller. You can also record custom greetings by groups as well.Back to the purchase by Google part of this story...
A purchase by Google makes sense. Plenty of benefits accrue to the Google applications suite with integrated messaging as an offering. Google seems to be gunning for Microsoft ona number of fronts. They've got docs, spreadsheets, e-mail, an RSS reader, IM, maps, recently acquired PowerPoint like presentation software and now a path to integrated messaging.
