my life

Dr. Philip Zimbardo

Get your 2 minutes of VC fame at http://vator.tv. Unfortunately, their current pitch competition is restricted to MIT alumni/students. Too bad we missed the Feb ‘07 cut off for the change to pitch Tim Draper, the founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

From their news:
Vator.TV MIT Pitch-Palooza Contest: March 1 - April 30.

I haven’t found a service as cool as this for a long time. The way it works is this: you signup and get your own personal grand central (GC) phone number in your desired area code. I chose 310, Santa Monica. You can associate with this number, any number of other telephone numbers, for example your mobile phone and home phone. When someone calls your GC number, it will ring on all your other phones at the same time. Simply pick up the phone you wish to talk from. Then, if you decide you need to leave your house while on the phone, you can transfer the active call to your cell phone.

Maybe you get a lot of call “spam”. In this case, when the call comes in you can press a key on your phone to mark the call as “spam”. You will not receive any future calls from this number. Alternately, you can turn on call screening. With this feature enabled,  the caller is prompted for their name. The service then calls you and plays the recorded message. You can press a key to accept the call or decline the call.

The feature list is too numerous to describe in detail. In short, you can record active phone conversations, download your voice mails as MP3s or listen to them online, view call logs, have a direct call button on your website, have the amazon “callback” service, etc..

The service is free for early adopters. They plan to eventually charge for premium features. You can keep your number for life, but not sure how strong that guarantee is wrt the life span of internet startups. I hope this one is here to stay.

 http://www.grandcentral.com/