I thought I would send a quick follow up on last week’s Byte based on some good questions and suggestions I received.

Once you have a Skype number you can easily forward it to a landline or cell phone: http://skype.com/intl/en/allfeatures/callforwarding/
This is very convenient for the times that you aren’t going to be online.

Bill in St Paul asked me about Grand Central (www.grandcentral.com). It is a great service that gives you one phone number that will ring at all of phones. It also gives you an online voicemail box. So you can track and store your voicemail messages online. It also allows you to:
• Record phone calls (great for podcasts)
• Receive notification of voicemails via email or text message
• Screen and block callers
• Filter calls – send various callers to various phones
• Switch phones in the middle of a call

I would love to try Grand Central – I even got an invitation to try it – but sadly they don’t accept members outside of the US right now. I signed up (and was wait-listed) over the summer but received the invitation to join a couple of weeks ago. So I can’t speak on the service firsthand – but I’ve heard great things.