VentureBeat

Start-up GrandCentral bets you have too many phone numbers and voice message boxes, and that you want to simplify things.

So GrandCentral gives you a single phone number that you can use anywhere. If you haven’t jumped in yet to use Internet phone (VoIP) services, some of its features will seem quite magical. VoIP is really coming in to its own, and Grand Central is showcasing it. The Fremont company has just launched, at the DEMO conference.

You do have to take out a new number with GrandCentral, but then you can manage it centrally online, and you’ll never have to change your number again. The idea of a central number is not new, but GrandCentral is worth a look for all the features it offers.

Simply getting a new number may be too much for some people to contemplate. But GrandCentral has made it very easy; we tried it out, and it works well. It is still in testing mode. There was a bug or two, but they were minor and should be fixed soon. You manage your calls through an online dashboard. You can choose which phones (cell, home or work) you want to route calls to, depending on who they come from. You can have the call ring to your work phone, for example, if it is someone from your general Outlook contact list (which you can import), or someone you don’t know. If it is a “friend” calling, you can have the call ring your cell and work phone; if it is your wife, you can have it ring to your home phone as well.

It centralizes all your voicemails so you can access them from the web or from any phone. You can customize greetings.

It is run by some former executives at Dialpad, the early Internet telephone company that launched with great fanfare in 1999. Dialpad was too early and struggled to make a profit. It went through bankruptcy, and was transformed by chief executive Craig Walker into an asset that he sold to Yahoo last year. Walker and colleague Vincent Paquet have now launched GrandCentral. So they are drawing on their expertise in VoIP.

If GrandCentral sounds familiar, it’s because it has a history. Halsey Minor, the founder of CNET created a company called Grand Central as a way to integrate all kinds of Web services — eBay, PayPal, Intuit — into a single platform. Despite getting $60 million in venture backing, it ran into trouble — as we reported last year.

This time, GrandCentral is a different company, but it is backed by Halsey Minor with an undisclosed amount of cash. Walker and Paquet bought the name from Halsey Minor.

There are many companies providing centralized phone services and helping you route calls to various phones. GrandCentral’s challenge will be to grab peoples’ interest amid the noise of all these offerings. GrandCentral, though, claims no other service provides the same bells and whistles. For example, it gives you a single voice messaging system, where you can store all your voice messages. It allows you to walk into your home with your cell phone, and transfer the call to your home phone without the person on the other end knowing it (you press star on your cell phone, your home phone rings, you pick it up, and the other person is on the line).

You can choose on the fly whether to take the call, or send to voice mail, depending who it is. You can “listen in” as someone leaves a voice message, just as you do on your home answering machine. With GrandCentral, you can do it from any phone — letting you jump in and take the call, for example, if you recognize the caller and decide it is important. At anytime during a call, before you pick up, or after you’ve started talking with someone, you can hit “4″ and the call gets recorded on the Web vmail.

It’s all made possible by a softswitch created by veteran engineer Don Fletcher. There is a lot here, and the user will need to take some time to absorb all of the various options — but the user interface makes sense. GrandCentral has a basic tour on its site, but we’ve recommended GrandCentral produce a screencast demo to better hand-hold people through the process. We’ve provided some partial screen shots below.

GrandCentral is offering a free service for a limited testing period. It gives you 100 minutes per month to use to call out. After the testing period, or after your 100 minutes run out, it will cost $15 a month, which will cover unlimited incoming calls.

(Update: Corrected name of company acquired by News Corp. It was Newroo)

Roundup of latest Silicon Valley action:

One of Digg’s top diggers, p9, has quit, and Netscape is grinning — When Kevin Rose, founder of the news-ranking site, Digg, said he wanted to make the voting process for stories more democratic, he apparently alienated some of the site’s top users. One top digger has left, and slammed the door loudly in protest. Here’s a good description of how Digg works, by the way, and a discussion about the changes underway. Of course, all this is giving Jason Calacanis (pictured above, with dog) fodder for saying he was right all along to offer to pay the top users at Digg and other news sites to leave join him at Netscape. Calacanis’ site competes with Digg. This has also sparked a debate about how long users can volunteer their time and energy digging sories for Digg without getting some reward or other form of recognition.

Now Calacanis is suggesting his parent company, AOL, consider stealing away top users from competitiors to AOL’s other sites, for example at Uncut Video, AOL’s clone of YouTube. He’s suggesting Uncut steal from YouTube’s best 1 percent of video posters: (Wow, this copying behavior is becoming quite a trend over at AOL):

So, I’m wondering if the folks on AIM pages or Uncut are seeing something similar and if similar strategies might work. Maybe Uncut should hire the top 20 video producers on YouTube to work for us? Maybe AIM Pages should hire the top 20 folks on MySpace to be part of our “leadership program” (or something like that). Have them train the user base and give feedback to the developers.

Video ads really that popular? — Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, has produced rosy set of calculations for the revenue video-sharing site YouTube can bring in from advertising. He estimates 80 percent of YouTube’s 100 million vidoes being watched daily can be monetized, with advertisers paying an average of $12 per 1,000 times these video are shown. He assumes YouTube will give users a cut for sharing their content, and arrives at a total $153 million net revenue per year. He says this is just back-of-the-envelope, and not meant to be exact, but even then we find it hard to agree with the analysis. Let’s face it, ads become a turn off at a certain point. The joy of YouTube is sitting there gawking at vidoes run over and over again. Forcing forcing people to sit through ten-second ad will radically change the experience. Here’s a Business Week article about the topic which shows much more skepticism.

InterActive Corp (IAC) the latest to media giant to move into deal-making mode –The big media companies are upgrading their buyout strategies. Sumner Redstone, chairman of media giant Viacom Sumner M. Redstone last week fired Viacom’s chief executive, Tom E. Freston, and replaced him a Philippe P. Dauman,a deal-maker. As the NYT reported, investment bankers scrambled to make lists of possible acquisition targets to pitch, including folks like YouTube, FaceBook and Bebe. In fact, even Viacom itself showed up on the list — as a candidate to be taken private by all the hungry private equity companies out there. This is the era of the acquisition, baby, and it Silicon Valley is getting its fair share. The latest comes from IAC, which has hired Kara Norman, the young associate with Battery Ventures, as its “vice president, mergers and acquisitions.” We teased Kara for chasing entrepreneurs through the NY’s Central Park, and now she will be based in New York where she can chase full-time, though she promises to visit the valley often — where there are plenty of acquisition possibilities.

Kara’s hire comes on the heels of IAC’s hiring of Jason Rapp, who will be her boss at IAC. Rapp was VP of online development and associate GM at New York Times Digital. He has joined Barry Diller’s IAC as senior VP, mergers and acquisitions. IAC, which owns properties like Evite, Ask, Ticketmaster, is giving the new hires a pretty broad mandate Kara said. IAC, of course, is smaller than NewsCorp, where Ross Levinson head of NewsCorp’s Fox Interactive division is making all the waves buying up Web 2.0 companies, such as MySpace and Webaroo Newroo.

Mendel Biotechnology has new ethanol technology — The NYT has a good summary of the various approaches to cellulosic ethanol production, which is where the great expectations are right now. Instead of corn stalks, perennial plants like grasses that require far less energy-consuming irrigation and fertilization than corn are looking promising. On this blog, we’ve mentioned most Silicon Valley companies active in the clean-tech already, but not Mendel, a Hayward company. According to the NYT, it is:

…looking more at miscanthus, a perennial grass native to China, where Mendel has set up an operation.

The company said miscanthus could produce well over 20 tons an acre each year. “No planting, no fertilizing, no irrigation,” said its chief executive, Chris Somerville, who is also the director of plant biology at the Carnegie Institution and a Stanford University professor. “You can just cut it every year for 10 years.”

Silicon Valley green-tech Young Innovator, Christina Galitsky. Technology Review pays tribute to Christina Galitsky — The publication has made Galitsky, 33, “2006 Young Innovator.” She left a chemical engineering program UC Berkeley with her master’s in 1999, and found work testing California’s water quality. She recognized contamination was coming from the power industry and, eager to fight pollution, joined Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. There, she began diagnosing energy waste in nearly a dozen industries, from concrete to beer, and is helping companies like wineries to spot their energy waste more easily.

New life for the Segway? — The high-tech scooter company’s chief executive James Norrod is taking “a much more expansive view of what Segway is about.” Instead of limiting the Segway to the two-wheeled personal transporter we’ve all gotten comfortable with — and, frankly, tired of — Segway can put its technology “into anything that moves.” According to a BW story:

That means unmanned vehicles with potential military or industrial uses, or multiperson vehicles that use Segway’s computers and electric engines to glide smoothly over obstacles. And Norrod thinks Segway’s efficient electric motors could be central to a new generation of hybrid cars (yes, cars). Segway has already built a four-wheeled, multiperson prototype. “If people want four wheels,” says Norrod, “I should give ‘em four wheels.”

Second Life database gets hacked – There have been several major Internet privacy snafus lately, and this one at Second Life is just the latest. A hacker apparently accessed account names, real life names and contact info. Sadly, it seems there’s nowhere really safe to play online anymore, even in the ultimate escapist world of Second Life.