There’s a battle brewing for control of your mobile address book. Don’t be surprised. Tap Tap Revolution or Twitterberry may get the love, but the address book is the most valuable app on your phone.
Phone numbers are not like email addresses. Those are often sensible or have a display name attached, and the message itself may have a signature. Xobni has shown that you can build an address book on the fly in Outlook by mining the headers and content of your email. Phone numbers are almost random. Area codes are losing their meaning thanks to virtual numbers and number portability; no major mobile operator supports Caller Name Display; there is no (official) directory of cell phone numbers; and you can’t sign a phone call. Unless you have a gift for memorizing 10-digit numbers, you have to maintain your own little routing table.
It’s tedious enough to stop some people from switching carrier if they can’t take their address book with them. In the US, most phones do not have swappable SIM cards. Until recently, few allowed third-party apps to access the address book, and almost none support SyncML out of the box. (This is why popular European services like Zyb, Soocial, and Funambol are not well known in the US - they were all originally based on SyncML.) Some carriers offer wireless backup and restore, but only between their own phones. Some even block you from sharing contacts one a time over Bluetooth. To transfer your address book, you have to hack your phone with BitPim or buy a $40 gizmo like Backup-Pal or CellStik.
But there’s much more at stake than “churn.” (more…)
Today we’re announcing a mashup of Skydeck and Google Voice that gives you the core features of both for free.
First, in case you don’t know, what is Skydeck and what is Google Voice?
Skydeck is your cell phone online. All your calls, text messages, voicemails and contacts are backed up on Skydeck.com and you can search, read, and reply to your messages (by voice or by text) from Skydeck as if it were your cell phone.
There’s no change to your phone number or the way you use your phone. The Skydeck app on your phone backs up all of your contacts, calls and texts to Skydeck.com. If you don’t answer a call, Skydeck takes a voicemail, converts the speech to text, and sends you an email. If you are at your desk, you can call or text people from Skydeck. The call appears to come from your cell phone, so your friends will know who it is. (more…)
Today Skydeck is announcing full support for phones powered by Windows Mobile 6.0 or later.
If you have a Verizon Touch, a Sprint Mogul or Treo 800w, a T-Mobile Dash, an AT&T Q or Blackjack or any other recent Windows Mobile phone, you can now enjoy all the features of Skydeck. All of your calls, all of your text messages, and all your cell phone contacts will be mirrored on skydeck.com as they happen, and you can search, read, and reply to your messages from Skydeck as if it were your cell phone.
Some features of Skydeck like voicemail transcription and Internet calling are compatible with almost every cell phone in the US, but before now you needed a Blackberry or Android smartphone to get the works.
Current users can download the new Windows Mobile Sync Client under ‘My Account’, and first-timers can get Skydeck at http://skydeck.com/signup.
At Skydeck we’ve been playing around with Google Latitude, the new feature of Google Maps for mobile phones that allows you to share your location with friends.
The Latitude idea has been floating around for years, but … it’s very hard to do well on one model of cell phone; there are actually hundreds of different kinds; there is no obvious revenue model; cell phone and Internet companies cannot agree on how to split the non-obvious revenue; and privacy advocates think the whole idea is insane. Google has cut through all of this by ignoring revenue for now, spending a fortune to build clients for many different kinds of phones as well as systems that can figure out the location of those phones without the help of cell phone companies, and promising to do no evil.
It works really well. If you connect to me, I can see where you are at all times. No more “I’m here - where are you?” phone calls. At a sprawling conference in Barcelona, the Skydeck team were able to keep track of each other and co-ordinate meetings. And my wife knows when I am on my way home. (more…)
A few weeks ago, Skydeck went to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. MWC is the largest trade show devoted to our industry and we were there to meet with several companies interested in working with us to launch Skydeck outside the US.
I wish we could say that we saw lots of cool new phones and applications at MWC, but they were few and far between. As many people have pointed out, some of the most interesting companies in the industry were not exhibiting in Barcelona at all (Apple), or doing invitation-only demos (Palm), or making cameo appearances in the booths of other companies (Google).
Most conspicuously absent? You, the consumer - someone who might actually want to buy a cool new phone or application. (more…)
We’ve had lots of great responses to Skydeck’s new features (check out the reviews) and lots of feature suggestions! Please keep them coming.
We’ve also been testing multiple price plans and combinations, including free trials, free and premium versions of the service, and gated access. For now we’ve settled on a 30-day free trial with unlimited access - that’s unlimited domestic calling in the US and unlimited voicemail transcription - so tell all your friends. (If you were not offered a free trial during the last two weeks of testing, we’ll be sending you an email to offer you one month free.)
If there’s one thing we hate more than dialing voicemail, it’s figuring out voicemail menus. We’ve just added a section to the ‘My Account’ page to let you manage your voicemail preferences from the web. You can choose text message alerts, email, or both, and you can even turn off transcription if you wish.
When we launched the beta version of Skydeck last June, we said that our goal was to help people manage their cell phones online. We said that you ought to be able to manage your cell phone conversations the same way that you manage your email. We said that this is your data, and that you ought to have more control over it.
This morning we released a new version of our service that delivers against all these ideas and more. We’re calling the new Skydeck “your cell phone, online.”
Now all of your calls, all of your text messages, all of your voicemails, and all of your contacts appear on Skydeck.com in real time, and you can search, read, and reply to your messages from Skydeck as if it were your cell phone.
For those of you who were already using Skydeck, let me just point out the new features:
All of your calls - including missed calls and voicemails, which never showed up in the original version of Skydeck.
All of your text messages - including the content of your text messages.
All of your voicemails - including the audio of your voicemails, plus a transcribed version that gets sent to you by text and by email, all stored on Skydeck.com.
All of your contacts - sync your cell phone directly to Skydeck.
In real time - not one day late.
Search - including the content of your texts and the content of your voicemails.
Reply - take advantage of your broadband connection, your headset, and your keyboard to place calls and send texts from Skydeck that appear to be coming from your cell phone.
We’ve completely redesigned the interface to incorporate all these new features (and almost accidentally I think we’ve built the best address book application on the web).
Technically, Skydeck combines an (optional) application on the handset, a Flash softphone, a voicemail system, and voicemail transcription with a completely redesigned version of our rich Internet application, our original software for collecting data from carrier web sites, and an expanded set of APIs that give you programmatic access to your data in real time. But that’s like saying a cell phone is a combination of a radio, a microphone, a speaker, a display, and a keypad. It’s really very simple: Skydeck is your cell phone, online.
For the best possible experience, you need a Blackberry or Android phone, with full support for Windows Mobile coming soon. But many of the new features of Skydeck are compatible with almost every cell phone in America, so please sign up to find out.
We’ve also kept our promise that the original features of Skydeck would remain free. Some of the new features are not, but plans start at just $9.95 per month - the same price as adding a line to your family plan.
Thank you for all your enthusiasm and suggestions over the past 6 months. We hope you enjoy Skydeck.
Skydeck will be unavailable from Sunday the 18th of January at noon PST until Monday the 19th at 8 am PST. This is our first planned outage. We promise that it will be worth it.
At Skydeck we believe that your phone records are your data, and that you should be able to take your data anywhere. That’s why we announced a set of APIs for accessing your data before we’d finished building our own service. Today we’re happy to announce the first three applications built using Skydeck’s APIs.
The first is from FreshBooks, the number one online invoicing service. Many of FreshBooks’ customers are consultants, designers, lawyers or other professionals who bill by the hour, and FreshBooks provides them with lots of tools for tracking their time. But it’s very hard to keep track of your cell phone calls, especially when you are away from your desk. When the team at FreshBooks read about Skydeck’s APIs, they realized that they could help their customers track and recapture all that time automatically. You can find the FreshBooks/Skydeck mashup here. (more…)
The first is from