Skydeck Is Now Your Cell Phone, Online
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.