New Tech Update

I've spent the morning playing with Google Voice and it seems like a fun, shiny new toy.

The concept is pretty simple: you create a master phone number - 612-234-5172 in my case - and then link to that one number all the other phone numbers of your life - home, work, cell, cabin, grandpa's barn, etc. When someone goes looking for you, they dial the master number and GV then finds you regardless of your location. You can add numbers on the fly so if you're staying someplace where cell service is spotty, you can add the landline of your cottage or the number of your colleague who's covering for you. Google has added lots of nice embroidery like voicemail that you can listen in on as it's being recorded (and pick up if you want), voice transcription, chatting, cheap international calling and more.

There's even a widget you can embed on a web site so visitors can call you right from the page:

Which is supposed to be right here, but I couldn't get it to work. Oh well.

Let me know what you think.

Google Voice is not without controversy, of course. Apple has pretty much refused to allow Google and others to distribute iPhone apps for the service and some people question the need for this kind of service in an era when people are increasingly shifting to a single phone number i.e. their cell that's always with them. That said, there is plenty to like about this tech and the capabilities it offers as Lance Ulanoff recently wrote.

GV is so far an invitation-only affair, but I don't think this is a tough ticket (I got one, after all). There's a link on the homepage above where you can sign up for an account.

I'm looking at using GV to create a virtual call center for crisis response and while I have to test it a bit more, in theory it should work. If it works as advertised, I should be able to stitch together a group of 5-10 people who - without having to convene at a central location - can receive calls dialed to a single number (replicating the "roll over" feature we old-timers recall from yesterday's phone systems). There are some questions to be answered about how much volume the system will handle and how much control I have over what rings and what goes to voicemail, but it's intriguing. Couple some functionality like this with some on-line collaboration tools so those same 5-10 people could be working off the same set of information and you'd address one of the big challenges of crisis response, namely the lag time between something bad happening and the company spinning up an organized communications response to the crush of inbound calls.

Wouldn't that be cool?

- Austin