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They also contribute back for all the other technologies you mentioned, and many more like launchd and now blocks/Grand Central.

Yes, Apple does block Grand Central, now known as Google Voice, on their iPhone store. How great of you to bring this topic back to what the Anonymous Coward way up at the top was referring to!

I understand you dont want to run for your phone -- Bluetooth won't reach up and down stairs, so linking phone and computer are likely not going to solve your problem. Why not use Grand Central http://www.grandcentral.com/ and a Skype number? Have Grand Central ring your cell and your Skype number at the same time. Then whichever you're closest to, you can answer.

Umm, it still exists, and it has been in open beta for a long time.

http://www.grandcentral.com/

It does all that's been mentioned in this thread and a lot more. Give it a try someday.

Google's grandcentral offers this (they call it call screening), and they offer more too. Currently in Beta. Currently free.

http://www.grandcentral.com/home/features

Screen Callers
Know who's calling and screen unknown callers

ListenInTM
Hear why someone is calling before taking the call

Call Record
Record calls on the fly and access recordings online

Block Callers
Unwanted callers won't be able to reach you anymore

Notifications
Receive voicemail notifications via email or SMS

Ring Different Phones
One number that rings different phones based on who's calling

Greetings
Personalize your voicemail greetings by caller or group

RingShareTM
Go beyond the ring and choose ringback tones for your callers

WebCall Button
Let people call you from a web page without showing your number

CallSwitch
Switch phones in the middle of a call

Click2Call
Call from your addressbook and save your typing

Mobile Access
Visual voicemail for your mobile phone

...and GrandCentral. Lord knows I record or "listinIn" _every_ incoming call from an unknown number and then send the telemarketers "to spam" where I never have to worry about them again.

GrandCentral also has its own spam filter of (supposed) telemarketers, and the application allows friends and family to get right through.

As long as you dont mind giving out a new number, you can use a service like GrandCentral
http://www.grandcentral.com/

Just for clarity, I don't want to use a VOIP solution; I need to use my plain old landline. My reason is this: if I'm watching a movie or listening to an MP3 while I'm waiting for a call, I don't want it to ever be apparent to the person who is on the phone with me, and I want to route all the audio I use through a single headset.

I use an LX-3000 headset I won with points from Live Search Club. There is no "Stereo Mix" option so WAV audio is totally separate from microphone input. Your callers will never hear your media.

1. Sign up for a number with FreeDigits or GrandCentral.
2. Configure X-Lite to use either service.
3. Forward your POTS line to your VOIP number.

The process is totally transparent to incoming callers. Only one USB headset required.

grand central's website

or what about their choice of Grand Central as their multi-threading tech? Google's not going to be too happy about that...

Hey nguy,

          Maybe you didn't look closely at what GrandCentral is offering. They do offer voice mail, forwarding, VoIP, call transfer, call recording, call now buttons (masking your number), simultaneous ring (calls mobile, land, gizmo), call screening, call blocking by number, and several other features. They are definately in beta but I think they have plenty to "appeal to people." http://www.grandcentral.com/home/features

they are very happy that people all over the world use (unlocked) iPhones, and Apple executives have probably spent a lot of time thinking about how they could have played the game differently with AT&T to still get the contract with them (which you'll remember took a major infrastructural investment on AT&T's part to bring the iPhone -- and only the iPhone -- visual voicemail)

I'm always impressed at how some people can apparently divine altruistic motives from Apple's management decisions. Every unlocked phone deprives Apple of a large chunk of potential revenue from the sale of its device in the form of monthly cash payments. Several reports last year estimated the cost to Apple of so many unlocked phones as ranging from $500m to well over $1 billion (the difference comes about depending on whether you account for the "missing" devices as languishing in the supply chain or reshipped to Asia).

But critically, apparently believing Apple's propaganda regarding the "difficulty" of implementing visual voicemail functionality leads me to lose trust in any of your assertions. Visual voicemail is not hard to do - it was around for several years before Apple's version, and if it's so difficult, how is it that companies like GrandCentral/Google can retrofit visual voicemail onto basically any phone with either a WAP browser or SMS facility? Add in a 3G+ network and a real web browser and it really shines. Given enough network neutral bandwidth, many things are possible. Microsoft can add Visual VOIP to phones with Portrait. Apple's continued invocation of the Herculean nature of its visual voicemail is a marketing smokescreen designed to convince its more fannish customers that bedding down with the telcos comes from necessity, not avarice.

Unfortunately, Grand Central uses Flash for just about everything, from listening to voicemails to placing a call. And it's a damned shame, because it would be so much better without the Flash.

Its always: "What can the phone do to make you consume more services?" Instead of "What does the consumer actually want?"

YES. You are so so so right about that. I am on the same soapbox. There are a ton of call-screening and other actual phone features that ought to be universal, but they don't create revenue streams, so they don't get made.

One thing I'd like is a compromise between turning my phone off at night and leaving it on. I want a mode where a caller gets a message saying, "I'm asleep or busy. If this is an emergency, press 1 to ring me anyway." I should also have the option to whitelist certain people to do this, or maybe just blacklist repeat offenders who wake me up. (After all, it could be someone calling on behalf of a loved one.)

As to your call-routing ideas, there is a service that does that and much more, which I stumbled upon a while back. They're not taking new users right now, but it looks freaking amazing. It has been bought by Google, and I practically have fantasies about an Android phone that integrates this service.

It's called Grand Central. It says it will let you hand out one phone number to everyone, and set rules for who rings to what phone - including "don't ring at all for these people." It also lets you record phone calls, switch phones in the middle of a call, have visual voicemail, personalize your voicemail greeting depending on who is calling, and more. SO SO cool.

I am chomping at the bit for a day when users' needs trump the carriers' desire to wring every cent out of us. I think that day is coming.

There is http://grandcentral.com/ but also http://dodgeball.com/ is another. These might be forgotten now but both might come back into play real soon once Android is available.

Google's newly acquired phone service, GrandCentral.com, was mentioned in the comments. I had not heard of it, but it sounds pretty amazing. It certainly explains Google Android and their bid for RF spectrum!

You can add one more thing to make your system even better. Sign up for Google's (free) Grand Central service. Put your cell phone and your landline on the service. When someone calls your Grand Central phone number (you can choose a phone number in any area code), both your phones will ring. You can choose which phone you want to answer. And if you're mid-conversation and want to switch phones (say, you just walked in your house and want to switch to your home phone; or you are just leaving and want to switch to the cell), you just press * and the other phone will ring, you pick the other phone up and continue the conversation like nothing happened, and hang up the phone you were originally on.

Then you can switch to a cell plan with far fewer minutes and your total communications cost is lower (because you can take calls on and switch calls to your home phone. Switching a call to your home phone is an inbound call, so it should be free).

Truthfully, I really like the service, though I got it for a different reason--my wife and I have cell phones in different area codes, and we don't live in either of those area codes. So I got a local Grand Central number for our local friends to call. Also, it makes it so I can call my wife from work (where I have bad cell reception) without calling long distance.

There are services that do that.

Dude, get yourself a couple of beers and stop wasting your time. 90% of ghost calls you receive are VoIP. Spoofing caller ID is trivial in VoIP environment. You don't have to be a telemarketer to do it. There are services like http://www.grandcentral.com/ (where google will collects samples of your voice) or http://www.xebba.com/ where you can get free 800 or local number and call anywhere anonymously for a couple of cents per minute.

Unless you're whitelisting your calls (which comes with a risk of losing an important one), your application, whocalled.us, or anything else that relies on caller id is not going to stop telemarketers. Oh, and by the way, they have a fleet of programmers with substantially better telephony skills that yours.

Agreed, [Visual Voicemail is] a great feature. Unfortunately, for that to be accomodated, you needed the telco to modify the way their voice-mail system works.

VV was around before the iphone (CallWave, Simulscribe) and Google/GrandCentral's implementation works on any phone currently, for free, and it's good. VV is just not that hard to do. It's easy if you have a real 3G connection, so that you can download the audio on-the-fly in response to user clicks. What's impressive about the Apple/AT&T implementation is that they managed to pull it off using super-slow EDGE. That's what required "epic" phone-carrier cooperation, clever caching, and why the companies involved feel it's a big deal. On that network, it is. On any modern network, trivial.

If you don't mind getting a new phone number, you could use a free service like GrandCentral. It gives you a single phone number that routes calls to your phones based on the caller and your rules, and lets you access all of your voicemail visually from the web. The website uses a flash plugin, but there's a mobile version. I don't have an iPhone, so I can't confirm if it works on mobile Safari.

I'm sure it requires more effort than the built in solution, but it doesn't care who your phone company is.

1. buy 2 TiVos - Satellite and/or Cable
   
2. Get two Quad-Core computers with tons of RAM - identical
   
3. Get two gee-wiz blackberry's or whatever
   
4. Get two inbound VoIP lines - http://grandcentral.com/ for each is an option too.
   
5. Get 2 web sites; create a third if you like, or not.
   
6. Have 3 checking accounts - his, hers, household
   
7. Have 4 credit cards from 4 different banks, not shared
   
8. Have 2+ cars
   
9. Have 2 master bedrooms for when you just want to sleep
   

It wouldn't surprise me if they already have a roadmap in place for rolling out a VoIP service, especially since they just bought Grandcentral

This page sorta gives out phonenumbers to some important people... Wonder if/when they'll take it down... Or have the numbers been faked?

http://www.grandcentral.com/home/one_addressbook

Cheers!

I am using a web-based service that, among other features, helps to control which calls will ring my phone(s): GrandCentral. It allows to define several groups of white-listed numbers with separate response behavior (ring, send to voicemail, etc.) and also includes a couple of different screening options. For dealing with known telemarketers they even offer to play a "number not in service" message, but most auto-dialers can't get past the call screening anyway. It's a free service while in beta, but they promise to keep basic features free indefinitely, including "unlimited inbound minutes, unlimited voicemail (up to 30 days old), and access to all of our core features". This NYT write-up describes a few of the options in more detail.

Probably too late (they have your real direct dial numbers ;>) but in the future, only publish numbers with a front end (like Grand Central http://www.grandcentral.com/howitworks/spam_and_bl ocked) where you can block calls from specific numbers or do a good job of screening ;>

If you get Gizmo Project and Grand Central, and configure the latter to use the former, you can get unlimited inbound calls for free.

I've been very happy with my Vonage service, and I hope they'll win this one in court eventually. If they don't, I'll reconfigure my Vonage hardware to use another SIP provider (like Gizmo Project): I'll switch back to TPC when heck freezes over.

To date, there have been a large number of tools dedicated to the creation and deployment of web services, but relatively little thought has been given to relationship management between services (a subset of which is security). Only a handful of companies (e.g., the deftly-named Grand Central and Flamenco) have started to broach this issue.

I think we can expect to see a large amount of activity in the area of what it takes to connect web services in the real world (i.e., with sensitive data, in business-critical operations, etc.) in the near future. One certainly would not one's web services to be abused/cracked as easily as Microsoft's Passport "technology". It will be interesting to see how this new market evolves.