Acquiring Satellites..

I’ve been using Kwiry for quite a while to do all sorts of stuff. I just got the announcment that they are shuttung the service down. The did provide a nice list of alternatives though.

from the Kwiry e-mail:

It’s with heavy hearts that we send this note. On April 23, 2009 (12AM PDT), we will be discontinuing the kwiry service. As of today, the service will no longer accept new sign-ups. We have very much enjoyed getting to know many of you and working to build features to help you get things done and simplify your lives. We appreciate all of your help, feedback and patience as the kwiry service evolved. Unfortunately, due to economic realities, we can no longer maintain the service.

From now until April 23, you can download all of your past kwirys in .csv format (can be opened in Excel as a spreadsheet) once you login.

We want to thank our wonderful and supportive investors at Hummer Winblad, our board of advisors and our partners. Also, we couldn’t have done any of this without the tireless support of our friends and family during the last few years.

Thanks for being part of the kwiry community,
-Ron, Steve & Nabil

I’ve got to evaluate what I’ll be moving to now. I’ll really miss being able to send a SMS to add things to my nexflix queue.

I’ve been using GrandCentral for quite some time now, the whole idea is really amazing. Basically they give you a new phone number and then you add a phone (or more which is the cool part) that will ring when you get a call. The freedom from a single phone and the calling features this gets you are amazing. Get a new cell number, just change it in one place and no one will know it changed. Want a record of your SMS messages, done. Need to record a call, easy. Annoying companies or people calling you, send them straight to voicemail without your phone ever ringing. There are probably 50 other cool features too.

I was a little nervous clicking the upgrade button to switch over to the new Google Voice interface since everything has always worked so well. It’s really much smoother to navigate than the old GrandCentral and they added a couple new features to the mix.

The coolest new feature in my opinion. Voice Mail Transcription. If someone leaves a voice mail for me it automatically gets transcribed and sent to my phone as a text message (or a few depending on how long the message was). It’s not perfect transcription but it’s good enough to get the message across. Much better than trying to listen to a voice mail in a noisy environment, or a 20 min long message if you have people who take forever to get to the point.

I’d love to be able to offer invites to people but currently they are still upgrading old users to the new system and not adding new users. You can sign up to get an invitation once things open up again, or talk to me and I’ll shoot you an invite as soon as I have some.