skydeck

Three New Apps Built On Skydeck

Posted by Jason on Nov 6, 2008 in Announcements, Programming  |  Comments (3)  |  Share 

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.

The second application is the simplest, but it may be the most popular. Developer Mick Thompson liked our minute meter, but thought it took up too much room in his browser. So he created a Mac Dashboard Widget that offers all the same information and more. Last month we made the Firefox toolbar optional, so some of you don’t have a minute meter at all. If you have a Mac, you can download Mick’s widget here or get it directly from Mick’s site. (And if you’d like to create a Skydeck widget for Vista, Netvibes, or Facebook, we’d love to hear from you.)

The third application is one that we didn’t anticipate at all. Dial2Do is a service that lets you do lots of simple tasks just by dialing a phone number and speaking. It’s perfect for drivers – you can compose an email, send a text message, or update Twitter without taking your hands off the wheel. Dial2Do already lets you import your contacts from Outlook, Gmail, and more. But when you say ‘call John’, or ‘email Mike’, which John or Mike do you mean? The Dial2Do team realized that Skydeck could do something that no other service can do yet – tell them which of your 1,000 or 10,000 contacts you actually speak to on a regular basis. Now when you sign up for Dial2Do you can import your 100 highest ranked contacts from Skydeck.

We know that there are more projects underway and we’re excited to see what people come up with. If you’d like to build a service using Skydeck’s APIs, you will find everything you need at skydeck.com/developer.