Skydeck is no longer a secret
We’ve been writing about the cell phone market at the Skydeck blog for almost a year without ever saying what Skydeck plans to do. That’s been pretty frustrating, since what we’re working on has implications for many of the problems that we’ve talked about here.
Skydeck still hasn’t launched — you need an invitation to join our beta test — but as of today we’re no longer a secret.
Skydeck is building an online service that will help people to take control of their cell phones and their cell phone bills.
First, we’re unlocking the valuable information hidden in your cell phone bill.
Add the Skydeck toolbar to your browser and we will fetch your cell phone bill each month and turn that dry list of numbers into a rich history of your conversations with friends, co-workers, and customers. For the first time you can search your call history as easily as you search your email; figure out where your money goes; and see your true social network, the people that you talk to and text every day. We think you’ll start to Love Your Phone Bill.
It’s your data — a record of every phone call you make and every text message you send, all the services you bought, and how much you paid for all of it. Your cell phone company uses it to market new services to you. The NSA uses it to figure out if you’re a threat to national security. If you work for a large company that pays for your cell phone, they may have programmatic access to your data and can see how you’ve been spending your time. It seems that everybody except you has access to your data. That’s where Skydeck come in.
Think about how much money is at stake. It’s not at all unusual for a family in this country to spend $3,000 on cell phones and service every year, and we know many individual consumers who spend that much or more. Are you getting value for money? Do you have any way of knowing? The answer is also hidden in your cell phone bill, and Skydeck will help you with that too. For starters, the Skydeck toolbar includes a meter that checks your minutes and text messages once a day so that you don’t have to. This alone means that you should never get a surprise bill again.
We’ve adopted a privacy policy that sets a new standard for this industry, clearly establishing that you own this data and we do not. And our security practices are more like a financial services company than a cell phone company.
We’re very excited about Skydeck and we look forward to helping you. To join our beta test, enter your email here. We’ll send you an invitation as soon as possible.
On behalf of the whole Skydeck team, I’d like to thank everyone who has helped us get to this point.
Congrats, guys! Looks fantastic.
[...] Link: Skydeck is no longer a secret [...]
Does this work on any phone? Do you need to install software on your phone for it to work? If so, what phones do you currently support and which ones do you plan to support in the future?
Alex,
Skydeck is web only today, although we have plenty of plans to deliver services to your phone in the future.
If you have an individual or family plan with any of the four major US cell phone companies (Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, Sprint, and T-Mobile), Skydeck should work for you. At this time we do not support business plans, prepaid phones, or plans that include a bundle of services like TV and Internet.
All of this is in our faq: http://skydeck.com/help
Thanks
Jason
sounds fab but really hope that you guys won’t make this as bill-centric as it sounds; remember, beyond the US there’s a world out there with nokia phones that all have logs/etc that can be downloaded to PCs already; so think you’d be missing a trick or three if you can’t take that into Skydeck and analyse it… something that neither PC Suite or LifeBlog can do
Stephen,
We’re well aware of life beyond the US – half of our employees were born and raised somewhere else. 85% of Americans get a monthly bill that lists every call they make, incoming and outgoing. 85% of Italians do not. Skydeck’s service will vary from one market to the next.
Jason
Jason – be good to have a chat offline about the euro markets when the time’s right
Jason,
Very nice idea! I was sorry to see that it was US only after I got my invite, but I understand that you need to start somewhere!
One or two points about possibly making this easier: I have access to my own bills online, in both pdf and csv formats, and I was hoping that I would have been able to input them/upload them here. Maybe this would be a means for more rapid expansion?
Also, In Ireland (much like Italy, as you mentioned) the majority of the market is prepaid, but most network providers have a “view my call history” service on their website which functions just like a bill.
And just to reiterate, great idea and the best of luck!
This is going to rock.
But… why must you keep calling it a “cell phone”, I cringe when I see that word.
As always guys ,brilliant work. For large corporates like ourselfs with many remote works this will be very helpfull.
Peter,
We are looking into lots of options for expanding outside the US. As you say, we have to start somewhere …
Ken,
We did some surveys and learned that the overwhelming majority of Americans prefer the term cell phone.
Marc and Craig, thank you!
I have been waiting for this 4 a long time, horray
Jason
You have to make it easier to give you guys feedback. Right now there’s no easy way.
Congratulations, guys. I wonder if the carriers will make your life difficult by using captchas or unilaterally changing their terms of use to disallow your access (I assume you’re scraping data out of their web sites) under the guise of ‘protecting’ cpni.
Very smart-like idea. You guys should be entrepreneurs.
Mukund,
You are right, we need to do a much better job on that – we’re considering feedback forms inside the app and public forums on the main site.