Humans are social creatures. When meeting someone face to face there’s a huge amount of emotional data transfered between you and the person you meet. Sweaty palms, how you move your arms and legs, what your eyes look at, a smile or a frown, if your face blushes or what your voice sounds like. Even how you smell. They are all signs of your emotional state Рlet’s call them emotional datapoints.

Accessing this emotional state of another person connects you to that person. By looking at a smiling person, you feel a little happier. A child crying makes you feel sad. The ability of a communication technology to transmit those emotions constitutes its’ emotional bandwidth.

Just like the company I am in the process of starting up: GlocalReach, Grandcentral is basically an internet based reach management system for voice communication (back in the 20th century they called it “telephony”).

Their idea is similar yet somewhat different from ours. They believe in the “one number for life” concept but I think it’s a feature, not a restriction, to be able to change number every now and then. In fact, I think every person wants many numbers, for different aspects of ones life: work, hobbies, family, friends etc.. As long as you can manage them easily, many phone numbers is not a problem but rather a way of better controlling how people can reach you.

Anyway. Google seemed to like what they were doing and Grandcentral has clearly shown that telephony and the web go together and has much value to add to each other.