Millions of people have more than one phone number these days — home, work, cellular, hotel room, vacation home, yacht — and with great complexity comes great hassle. You have to check multiple answering machines. You miss calls when people try to reach you on your cell when you’re at home (or the other way around). You send around e-mail messages at work that say, “On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I’ll be on my cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home.”

And when you switch your job, cellphone carrier or home city, you have to notify everyone you know that you have new phone numbers.

A new service called GrandCentral, now in its final weeks of public beta testing, solves all of these problems. It’s a rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.

Its motto, “One number for life,” pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral.com, you choose a new, single, unified phone number (more on this in a moment). You hand it out to everyone you know, instructing them to delete all your old numbers from their Rolodexes.

From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uninumber, all of your phones ring simultaneously, like something out of “The Lawnmower Man.”

No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you’re home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.

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Comcast Corp. Chief Executive Brian Roberts dazzled a cable industry audience Tuesday, showing off for the first time in public new technology that enabled a data download speed of 150 megabits per second, or roughly 25 times faster than today’s standard cable modems.

The new cable technology is crucial because the industry is competing with a speedy new offering called FiOS, a TV and Internet service that Verizon Communications Inc. is selling over a new fiber-optic network. The top speed currently available through FiOS is 50 megabits per second, but the network is already capable of providing 100 Mbps and the fiber lines offer nearly unlimited potential.

The technology, called DOCSIS 3.0, was developed by the cable industry’s research arm, Cable Television Laboratories. It bonds together four cable lines but is capable of allowing much more capacity. The laboratory said last month it expected manufacturers to begin submitting modems for certification under the standard by the end of the year.

In the presentation, ARRIS Group Inc. chief executive Robert Stanzione downloaded a 30-second, 300-megabyte television commercial in a few seconds and watched it long before a standard modem worked through an estimated download time of 16 minutes.

Stanzione also downloaded the 32-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica 2007 and Merriam-Webster’s visual dictionary in under four minutes, when it would have taken a standard modem three hours and 12 minutes.

“If you look at what just happened, 55 million words, 100,000 articles, more than 22,000 pictures, maps and more than 400 video clips,” Roberts said. “The same download on dial-up would have taken two weeks.”

AP

Every business owner knows it: If you could just talk to prospects one-on-one, you could convert them to customers.

Click-to-chat and click-to-call features, of course, have existed for years, but now there’s a new, more viral twist. Starting today you can test out a new service that attempts to combine the best of social networking with Internet-based telephony. In short, it gives visitors to your Web site or a blog a free local number to call from virtually anywhere. All you have to do is add a widget to your site, blog or e-mail signature.

Jaxtr has been in private beta testing, but now you can see and hear it for yourself as the company today announced the launch of the public beta of its service. After you sign up for a free Jaxtr account, you can link your mobile or landline phone with your online network. And while it’s not strictly an e-commerce tool, it could prove itself to be a new way for you to interact with your customers. For example, the VoiceBlast feature allows you to record your own voice to automatically greet and update customers who visit your blog or Web site. By adding a “Jaxtr widget” to your online profile or blog, you can take calls from prospects worldwide while keeping both parties’ phone numbers private.

Ecommerce-Guide

A Pennsylvania entrepreneur has developed technology that gives you all the battery juice you need directly from the air.

How much money could you make from a technology that replaces electrical wires? A startup called Powercast, along with the more than 100 companies that have inked agreements with it, is about to start finding out. Powercast and its first major partner, electronics giant Philips, are set to launch their first device powered by electricity broadcast through the air.

It may sound futuristic, but Powercast’s platform uses nothing more complex than a radio–and is cheap enough for just about any company to incorporate into a product. A transmitter plugs into the wall, and a dime-size receiver (the real innovation, costing about $5 to make) can be embedded into any low-voltage device. The receiver turns radio waves into DC electricity, recharging the device’s battery at a distance of up to 3 feet.

Picture your cell phone charging up the second you sit down at your desk, and you start to get a sense of the opportunity. How big can it get? “The sky’s the limit,” says John Shearer, Powercast’s founder and CEO. He estimates shipping “many millions of units” by the end of 2008.

For years, electricity experts said this kind of thing couldn’t be done. “If you had asked me seven months ago if this was possible, I would have said, ‘Are you dreaming? Have you been smoking something?’” says Govi Rao, vice president and general manager of solid-state lighting at Philips (Charts). “But to see it work is just amazing. It could revolutionize what we know about power.”

money.cnn.com

EZPay, a Chehalis, Wash.-based financial services firm, has launched an application that enables small businesses to have checks printed and mailed online.

EZPay Small Businesses Solutions eliminates the need for business to print checks in the workplace and mail them to customers, clients or suppliers separately, saving time and resources, the company said.

“This is the first of several new products designed for small and medium-sized businesses who have been traditionally unwilling to take advantage of electronic payments due to a lack of IT resources and the inability to seamlessly integrate with their accounting software,” Ronald Ehli, CEO of EZPay, said in a statement.

Jim Blasingame

Most manufacturers build point-and-shoot digicams with 3x zoom lenses. That’s great for shooting faraway subjects, but the zoom function narrows the camera’s field of vision, making it impossible to shoot broad landscapes or to squeeze all of your friends into one close-up frame.

Owners of pricey SLRs solve the problem by popping a wide-angle lens onto the camera body; Kodak (EK) engineers gave the EasyShare V570 pocket camera the same capability by equipping it with two independent lenses–one zoom and one wide-angle–that switch automatically. To draw attention to Kodak’s breakthrough configuration, industrial design consultant BlueMap highlighted the dual-lens system and shrouded the camera in a retro-cool design.

Read the review.

Jingle Networks, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based directory assistance service, has added a new feature that allows users to search the Yellow Pages for phone numbers and addresses by business type and location from any phone at 1-800-FREE411.

The free service also allows advertisers to reach consumers looking for their type of business, and as such can be used as a branding and direct-response media channel for targeted messages, the company said.

Inc.