Many people are not aware of these two great phone services that cost you nothing. These are both startup companies with cash to burn and very clever business models. Grandcentral.com allows you to have one phone number for your cell phone, house phone and work phone. JaJah.com allows you to place free local and international calls on your regular phone with no downloads, installation, headset or contracts.
One Phone Number for Work, Mobile and Home
GrandCentral.com
Grandcentral.com offers a very enticing product by allow you to not only have one phone number for all your phones but it also allows you to change it anytime so if you change jobs, get a new cell phone number or house phone number you will still be able to keep one phone number for all of them. They like to say you should be able to keep one phone number for life. This is great because you don’t have to worry about missing calls if you change jobs or move anywhere.
Very Nice Extra Features
Grandcentral also has quite a bit of extra features, like being able to set up custom voicemails and greetings for different phone number. This is awesome if you use your mobile phone for work. You could have a casual greeting for friends and family and a professional message for clients or coworkers. Another nice extra is if you want to block a phone number from calling you this can be done quick and easily by just logging into your account online. I think many phone companies charge for this, as if I had a stocker 😛
You can also record your calls, in case you forgot a conversation or directions over the phone. This feature is very cool and can also be used for evil purposes if you know what I mean. Here is a favorite of mines, you can also listen in on callers leaving a message, so you can decide to take the call or not. I know, I know, I’m evil but you know you do the same.
So what the heck is the catch?
Well as of right now there is none, but there not available nationwide but they are in most states right now. I suspect in the future it will remain free but they will probably charge you for the extras features if you want to continue to use them. I guess they want to you use all their services and get hooked so you buy the extras. "First one’s free" as the drug dealers say. Regardless it still looks like a winner to me, check it out.
JaJah.com
JaJah.com allows you to make free local and international calls in a very simple no hassle way. They make it about as seamless you can by not having you to worry about software, downloads and not making you use those darn headsets. You can use your regular home phone or a mobile phone.
Throw those Calling Cards Away
With so many people using mobile phone with free or unlimited long distance this is not really something new, but for the people without a cell phone (Yes, there are still a few of those dinosaurs around) this has great value. I think the people that will benefit the most are the people that call internationally, I’m not sure what the rates are but you could probably save a lot by using this service. So if you know anyone making many international calls be sure to let them know about this service.
Got the Phone Bill Blues?
So what is the kicker?
Well, in order to place a free call the other user has to be a JaJah.com user also. If not you will have to pay, but their rates look very competitive. If you talk to the same person most of the time getting them to sign up as a JaJah.com member should be a no brainer.
Anybody use any other services yet? If so, let me know what you think.
Technorati Tags: jajah, mrcheapstuff, grandcentral, phone, steroids
Also take a look at PrivatePhone.com Can be very useful if you need a temporary number with a voicemail 7k.net was also good until it went out of business (they offered voice mail and fax, all free)
Thanks, Private Phone look pretty slick also, I didn’t know about that service. I like the voicemail to blog feature.
if you want to make free international calls from from your mobile, then you should go and have a look at http://www.rebtel.com.
you get ten free calls a month, to 1.3 billion people anyone in the rebtel community. if you want to call outside the community or make more than 10 calls a month, then calls start from 2 cents per minute.
see where you can call at http://www.rebtel.com/en/Rates/Rates/
it’s free to join and takes less than a minute.