Everybody Loves Your Money

A friend of mine sent me his horoscope today.  It reads:

Wow.  I haven’t seen a horoscope so directed at consumerism before.  I think the horoscope gods should consider rotating this horoscope each month.  You can’t tell me that Taurus’ are the only ones that need to hear this message.

I am a huge fan of Google GrandCentral.  What is it?  GrandCentral gives you a phone number in the area of your choosing.  You can give that number out and route calls to any other phone.  When someone calls our GrandCentral number I have it ring our home, our cel phones and my laptop (Skype).  By using this number, our friends and family can reach us wherever we are.  If we happen to be at the lake, the calls come in on our laptop via Skype.  If we are out and about, we take the call on our cel phone.  If we answer it on the laptop and want to transfer the call to our cel phone, no problem.

An even better feature is the ability to make long distance calls via GrandCentral for no cost.  I have uploaded all of my contacts for home and work to the online address book. If I want to make a long distance call, I simply bring up that contact on the website and click the "call" button.  Instantaneously my home phone rings and when I pick up I can hear the phone ringing on the other end.  The person answers and we can talk as long as we like for FREE.  I’ve found myself using this feature for work a lot.  When I’m working in my home office and need to call someone out of my local calling area, I simply add them to GrandCentral (very quickly) and then push "call".

I’m anxious to see what new features they come out with next.  It’s hard to believe this service will last forever because I know they are paying the connection fees for all of those long distance calls.  I can only assume that they will be putting ads on the site etc to bring in revenue.

I’m also interested to check out the "Magic jack" product.  It’s not related to Google but I’ve been hearing a lot about it.  It sounds like it gives you the ability to use any phone to make long distance calls anywhere in the country for free.  You simply buy a little usb device that’s about the size of a matchbook and plug it in to the computer.  There is a standard phone jack (RJ11) on the end of that little device that you can plug any regular phone in to.  It’s that easy.  You simply pick up the phone and dial.  It costs $39.95 to buy the device and pay for the first year of service and then it’s $19.95 per year after that.  Wow.  That’s cheap.

Has anyone been using the Magic Jack?

I should also thank Jonathon at MyMoneyBlog for turning me on to Grandcentral and telling me how to get on the beta!!!