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Skydeck and Google Voice

Techcrunch today went with a post "Skydeck Mashed Up With Google Voice Could Be The Perfect Combination".

I'd not heard of Skydeck, so I checked this out with interest tonight.

They are similar to GV but instead of managing all your phones, they manage only your cell phone. They do transcribed voice mails like GV, you can send SMS text from your PC that looks like it came from your cell, you can backup your addresses etc. all like GV.

Their main talking point is that you don't have to hand out a new phone number, but that it works with your existing cell phone number.

As I mentioned in a post in April, how you implement GV can take some thought. I finally decided to use it as a manager for my cell phone calls, not unlike Skydeck.

With GV, I have to hand out a new phone number, but that is advantageous. The phone number I give to customers is independent of my the phone. If my cell phone is lost or stolen or breaks, incoming calls can be routed to another phone easily.

If I ever regret giving anyone my cell phone number, I can easily screen them with GV. Not sure I can do that based on what I read about Skydeck.

Skydeck does make the point that with them, you'll still get calls to your cell if the internet is down. With GV, if Google is down, you won't get your calls. Google does have outages.

There are some people who may want Skydeck's functionality. Personally, it does not fit into my process. Apparently it relies on having access to your cell phone providers online account information for your phone. With Verizon, I would have had to buy that for $3 a month on top of Skydeck's cost. Seems sort of kludgey to me.

Best of luck to them. For a startup to be going up against Google who is offering their product for virtually free, is daunting.
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Comments

  1. UnknownMay 13, 2009 at 8:34 PM

    Mark, thanks for writing about us.

    Skydeck is designed for people who use a cell phone all the time. Our users are typically sales or business development professionals, realtors, consultants etc. For many of them, changing their number, changing the way they place calls from their cell phone, or suffering an Internet outage is just unacceptable. For other people, Google's call screening and blocking features are more important.

    Skydeck does not require access to your online account information. You can import your call history from your provider's account one time, but that's optional. By the way, that doesn't cost $3 per month, unless you are on a plan that I am not familiar with. (You may be mixing this up with your cell phone company's phone backup service, which often costs around $3 per month.)

    Best
    Jason

    ReplyDelete

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