Use GrandCentral for a free business line

Google-acquired GrandCentral offers a high tech “phone number for life.” The service is currently free, so why not use it to get a separate phone number for your business?

The premise of GrandCentral is pretty cool. Sign up for a phone number to be managed online. Then point it to any number of phones, be it your cell phone, home phone, or work phone. You can even have it ring certain phones, depending on who’s calling.

Among that is a number of other features:

• Voicemail that can be listened to on your phone or computer
• Caller screening
• Ability to mark callers as spam and give them fake sounds like a “this line is disconnected” message
• Ringbacks

As I said, this is all free for now. I set up a business line on GrandCentral a year ago and have received several inquiries from posting the number online. Plus it’s nice to know that a call is business-related when it comes through on my cell.

One risk: The service may not end up being free in the future, but I’d suspect that there’d be a good chance that they would offer part of the functionality for free. (It is owned by Google, after all!) And the law is that you should be able to transfer your number to another service provider, which I assume will be an available option if Google starts charging for the service.