GrandCentral is one of googles lesser known services. If you haven’t heard of it, straight from GrandCentral.com

But it does much more. It is a much more permanent and feature full version of Numbr. Im not raggin on numbr because it is a very useful service for things like eBay, craigslist, etc… and I actually use it very often. But back to the subject at hand. GrandCentral’s features are very useful and I have personally used all of them.

ListenIn is a new one for me. You can actually listen to someone as they are leaving you a voicemail and if you don’t want to talk to them simply let them finish their message, if it’s something important or you feel like you need to talk to them now simply pick up and start talking to them.

The Call Screening is another cool one, letting you import your address book contacts so that when someone from your address book calls you, GrandCentral can notify you that person is calling. What happens if its a new business client or friend? GrandCentral simply asks them who they are and lets you know before you pick up.

CallRecord lets you do exactly what the name says. It does notify the other caller that you are recording so don’t try and be sneaky. I guess I can see this being used more for legal stuff than anything else. I guess its nice to have if you do a lot of that stuff.

Those are the more interesting features of GrandCentral. The others have a little less wow factor but high usability. Notifications simply SMS you or email to let you know if you have a voicemail. GrandCentral goes beyond those novelty ringtones and calltones on TV that have cause so many teenagers parents headaches over 600$ worth of ringtone rap. You can assign each person or group a Greeting or Calltone. Another novelty is GC’s ability to forward to your Gizmo account. Not sure how this would work with Skype or other VOIP services but cool nonetheless.

Welcome to JakobMetzger.com. I hope to provide you with not necesarily new but interesting and fun News and Tech Projects that I do. I do simple mods to many things like the iPhone, XBMC, OS X, Xbox360, and whatever else I can mess with. Not only modifications or “hacks/hackz” but I also am active in Home Theaters, Home Automation, and much more!

I will hopefully be bringing you guides and tutorials for things that you might like to do. Maybe very simple things but there are things I have seen across the web that I think could be improved and I try to do that. I am interested in maybe making some tuts for things that I have done work with and share tips that I picked up along the way. Just random projects that I have been using like Mambo, script.aculo.us, CarPC’s, various others…

The site is slowly going up because this is the first time I am using a CMS(content management system) to run one of my sites so there is a lot I am learning. Hopefully by the end of January I will have smoothed out all the kinks.

Another part of this site that I want to start up is an Ideas section. I believe that my experience in a broad array of forums, online communities, programming, and hands on modding will help this section out. I have a few things rattling around in my head that I think I should get out there.

Thanks for giving this site a try!