I’ve been chatting with Craig Walker of GrandCentral over the last little while mostly about new GrandCentral features and the Canadian phone numbers coming soon (yeah!), but I also asked him about Project CARE (Communications and Respect for Everybody). It is a social program they started right out of the gate aimed at helping homeless people more easily communicate with family, employers, social services, doctors, and so on. Using GrandCentral, individuals  in need receive a free local phone number and voicemail box for life. The program is currently offered in the San Francisco area but there are plans to go nationwide.

What impresses me about Project CARE is that GrandCentral saw how their technology and services could really benefit people in need, right from the inception of the company.

“We always wanted to use our services to help the community around us” says Craig, “and we strongly feel that private companies can be very effective when deploying new and enhanced technologies to help social problems.  We focused on the homeless because we realized that without a local phone number of voicemail system there is virtually no way to get out of the cycle of homelessness.  How do you get a job if there’s no way to reach you?  Housing?  Health Care?  We also started working with a number of battered women’s shelters who have similar issues of needing an ability to communicate with the outside world when everything else is lost.”

We had a recent dump of snow in our area, enough to close schools for a day and wreak havoc on commuter traffic, and my son asked me about what the homeless do in weather like this. Well, what do they do? I think it’s an unfortunate fact that we don’t generally think of people in desparate situations until our own situation turns a little upside down. Indeed, living on the street in winter is something my kids can’t comprehend. Kudos to GrandCentral for putting their great product to greater use.

I’ve been wondering about the GrandCentral “One number for life” mantra, and TalkPlus‘ second number for your mobile phone. While I understand these products target different markets, I find it hard to keep them distinct in my mind. It dawned on me that this could be a problem that consumers have as well.

There’s a lot of chatter about Voice 2.0 applications–the user in control not the network–but that is the VOIP blogosphere talking. Me, I think okay, I get another number, it’s free for now, and it’s solving what problem exactly? 

GrandCentral:

Provides a phone number not tied to a device or location. When people call this number, the phones you have “attached” to it ring, like your cell phone, home phone, and office phone. Up to six phones can be linked to your GrandCentral number. The service is all about giving you control over how people reach you (inbound calling) as opposed to how you place calls. Callers can leave voice messages that can be checked by phone, email or online. You’re notified of a voice mail via email or text message to a cell phone. And you can flag unwanted callers as spam. It’s also free.

You need it if people have a hard time tracking you down. You find yourself playing telephone tag. You WANT to be found but heck, you’re always bouncing between work, home, and on the road.

TalkPlus:

Provides a second number for your cell phone so you can separate personal life and work life. The number can be used as a second line for business, dating, classified ads, online auctions, social groups, or a second residence. Like GrandCentral, unwanted callers can be blocked while priority numbers ring through. When making outbound calls, you can specify which caller ID to use so that the person you are calling doesn’t know how or where you’re calling from.

You need it if your mobile phone is your primary means of communication but the  separation of work and play is important to you. You want people to know that you’re calling from the office (the caller ID says this is a work-related call) even though you’re calling from home or the beach in Maui. You are also concerned about personal privacy and want to make sure that your personal number is only available to the people you want to have it.

***

In talking with Craig Walker, GrandCentral CEO, he tells me they couldn’t be more different than TalkPlus.

“Our philosophy is that we don’t need MORE numbers for people to reach us at…we need less.  As long as I have the control over my inbound calling that GrandCentral gives me, there’s no reason that I would want to juggle different personas. I don’t want phone numbers that identify me as being located at a certain place or doing a certain thing, I want a phone number that is personal to me.  If you want to reach me, call my ONE NUMBER.  I’ll be able to answer it wherever I want…I will be able to know who’s calling every time, and I’ll even be able to listen in on the voicemail as its being left if I’m still unsure whether I want to take the call.  When somebody calls me, they shouldn’t be able to “figure out” or know where I am based on the number…if I’m in the office, working from home or on the beach, that’s my business.” 

Obviously there’s more to both GrandCentral and TalkPlus than what I describe here, and the enthusiasm voiced by many in the VOIP blogging community seems to be not so much what these services are doing today, but what we can expect from them in the future.

To set up a free GrandCentral account, click here. To sign up for a TalkPlus sneak peak beta (for Cingular, T-Mobile, and Sprint customers in select U.S. states only), click here. TalkPlus won’t be a free service like GrandCentral and pricing is to be determined.

I recently mentioned Jangl in Battle of the Js. On first look, I wasn’t overly enthused–the home page promise didn’t mesh with the user interface/support once logged in. But since then I’ve had chance to talk with the folks at Jangl to learn more about their service. They agree the user experience is something they need to improve, and are working hard to get there as we speak.

Jangl’s Tim Johnson was able to walked me through all this, so now I get it. However, he knows you can’t personally explain the concept and use to everyone. Improving the overall package to make the service clear and easy to use is part of Jangl’s planned enhancements over the next month and a half, starting with the announcement last week of a new Jangl widget for Tagged, a social networking site. Today, Jangl announced a new TypePad widget which will give TypePad bloggers and their readers anonymous phone numbers for talking, texting and exchanging voicemail on their mobile phones.

Here’s what I learned about Jangl:

It is all about connecting two people without sharing phone numbers. The two people can be bloggers, social networking junkies, or they can be “off Net” contacts.  Why would you want to keep your phone number private? Well, let’s say you’re selling something on Ebay or Craigslist you don’t want to share a personal phone number. Or you have a personal profile on a social networking site and you want to connect with your fans without sharing a personal number. Or how about you are using an online dating site like Match.com and want to keep your contact number private.

There are two ways people can get an exclusive number for you. As a Jangl user, you can give out your Jangl ID or you can post a Jangl widget on a website or email. If you give your Jangl ID out at a party, for example, the person goes to Jangl.com and follows the instructions to generate a number for you. If someone clicks your Jangl widget online, the widget generates the number. Either way, people can call you on a regular landline or cell phone. You answer the call on whichever phone is attached to your Jangl account. It could be a mobile phone or an office phone, for example. You can choose to answer based on the caller’s introduction, or you can send the call to your existing voicemail system.

Because Jangl relies on the use a regular phone to make the actual calls, not a computer platform, you can receive calls from fellow bloggers visiting your Typepad site while out and about on your mobile phone. YOU don’t have to be sitting at your computer. And once the other party has generated a number for you AND specified their mobile as the phone they’ll be calling from, then they can call you from anywhere as well. That’s a pretty cool way to take your online profile with you.

The only required online part of the process is generating the phone number. Once that’s done, the computer is completely out of the picture. You can maintain a list of Jangl contacts online in your account, but that’s up to you.

Who pays? To get a Jangl ID and create an online widget of your own is free, but because the calls you make and receive are on regular mobile phone or landline networks, you pay the appropriate fees to the service provider.

Hope this helps!