If you find this writeup helpful,  you can use this number as a Ring Central Referral Code: 8888395401.  Also hit this link for $10 off  RingCentral and this one for 10% off.

I’ve been playing around with a service called RingCentral over the last few days. RingCentral subscribers get dedicated 800 or local numbers with set minutes per month for set prices. Packages start at $15 for 100 minutes. Nothing crazy, right? Well, check out the functionality they offer on top of the number.  Not only can you route your RingCentral number to any other number (like a cell phone), you can:

• route outgoing calls through your RingCentral number so it shows up on recipient caller ID
• receive faxes via email
• send faxes directly from email
• receive voicemail audio files via email
• configure virtual a PBX switchboard (5 extensions for the $15 packages)
• configure separate voicemail boxes for virtual extensions
• drop a pre-configured click-to-call widget onto a website

Additionally, you can load rules on top of the number based on time and caller ID, so can easily do things like route calls directly to voicemail after business hours or block calls from specific callers. I’ve had the number for a bit more than a week and haven’t yet to received a spam fax and have been blown away by their customer service. I had an extensive chat with a salesperson who talked me through the product and have called tech support several times since I signed up to figure out features. I reached helpful people on the phone extremely quickly. This is more than I can say for eFax: terrible customer support and tons of spam. It was even an ordeal to cancel my account with them. Leave a comment if you’re thinking about signing up with RingCentral and I’ll give you a referral code (edit:  see bottom of this writeup for a code). Thus far I highly recommend the service.

GrandCentral (who I’ve written about before) offers similar services but is targeted towards personal use and has been closed to new users since they were acquired by Goooooogle. Interestingly, according to GigaOm, their pricing plan was nearly identical to what RingCentral currently offers ($15/100 minutes/month). However, GrandCentral recently changed ~400 subscriber numbers, which is illustrative of the dangers involved in using a service like this - the number you get is not technically yours. GrandCentral stated that they had to change the numbers because a “pre-acquisition underlying carrier stopped providing services to certain areas”. It’s unclear which providers are underneath GrandCentral, but I’m pretty sure Ingenio is under RingCentral.

RingCentral has an interesting background to say the least. They were founded in 1991, were part of Motorola from ‘98 - ‘99, and raised a $6.25m A round in January ‘07 from Khosla and Sequoia. There are no typos in that sentence. They went 16 years from founding to Series A, with a corporate acquisition in between. So Sequoia and Khlosa put $6m into a 16 year old RingCentral in January and Google bought nearly identical GrandCentral for ~$50m in June. I’ve already written about my theory on the GrandCentral aquisition. Maybe I’m right on that, maybe I’m wrong. Either way there is some interesting stuff going on in this space. Of course I could be way off and GrandCentral could have been bought so every GPhone user has a GNumber…