Grandcentral making its way to Spain

Thu 8 January 2009 12:34, Bas van den Beld

Google seems to be planning to getting into the Spanish mobile phone market. According to the Spanish website Expansion.com Google wants to roll out its voice service Grandcentral in Spain during 2009.

With Grandcentral you can ‘control your phones’ through the web. You get a phone number from Google, when the number is called it is redirected to any number you want. That way you can filter numbers by who is calling and you can actually listen in when somebody is talking into your voicemail. When you think its urgent enough you can then take the call.

Other features that Grandcentral offers are recording calls, Switching phones, blocking users and recording custom greetings.

Grandcentral is an addition to your phone-subscription, not a replacement. It integrates your different phonenumbers. Google will allow free voice calls to be placed but you will have to pay for the voicemail service itself.

Google acquired Grandcentral in February 2007 and it has been in beta since and doesn't seem very succesfull so far. For now Grandcentral has only been working in the US for a limited amount of users. Spain would be the first European country in which Google would roll out Grandcentral.

The Spanish market is dominated by Vodafone and Telefonica (Movistar). Spain is a country with a fairly high usage of mobile phones. It has got over 50,7 million subscribers. Seems like Google wants ‘a piece of the action’. With Grandcentral Google will not have to be a network operator but still get the revenues.

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