I used to work for "Grand Central Communications". It was really a vision of what not to do with a startup: Enormous development cycle, bleeding money (Hasley Minor, the principle investor and CEO, used to compare it do driving an Audi off the roof of the building every day), way too many people, sales team constantly selling functionality we did not support.
In late 2005 after multiple rounds of layoffs they cut their losses and folded. Existing team members willing to stick around formed Swivel (http://swivel.com) based on what we were working on at the time (which had nothing to do with what Grand Central was doing a year earlier). The name (and I guess trademark) "Grand Central Communications" got inherited by a VOIP company that was also funded by Minor Ventures (http://minorventures.com/) and that's the company O'Reilly is talking about. Good to hear they're turning the name around.
I remember when GrandCentral had some kind of an enterprise web service stack! I still have their CD somewhere from 2001 conference I attended. No wonder that idea went nowhere... you couldn't even describe it in 2 sentences. From what I remember, they went through a mountain of cash.
I signed up for GrandCentral some time ago, got a nice 408 number, but I never got around to using it. It's one of the coolest services I've seen offered recently and that's because it passed my litmus test for quality: I see myself using it. That said, I haven't used it _yet_, but I can see it coming in handy very soon.
I used to work for "Grand Central Communications". It was really a vision of what not to do with a startup: Enormous development cycle, bleeding money (Hasley Minor, the principle investor and CEO, used to compare it do driving an Audi off the roof of the building every day), way too many people, sales team constantly selling functionality we did not support.
In late 2005 after multiple rounds of layoffs they cut their losses and folded. Existing team members willing to stick around formed Swivel (http://swivel.com) based on what we were working on at the time (which had nothing to do with what Grand Central was doing a year earlier). The name (and I guess trademark) "Grand Central Communications" got inherited by a VOIP company that was also funded by Minor Ventures (http://minorventures.com/) and that's the company O'Reilly is talking about. Good to hear they're turning the name around.