TechDomino
Have you ever gotten called by numbers you don’t know, which made you even want to not answer them, because you feared it may be some telemarketing company? Of course you have. Everyone has had this problem for ages. But until smartphones (Android smartphones, to be exact) arrived, you couldn’t really solve this problem with a mobile phone.
Here comes Contactive, which promises to show you who’s calling you, even if you don’t have them in your contact list, by crowdsourcing everyone’s numbers through integration with Facebook, Google+,Twitter, Linkedin, Skype, and many other sources.
Contactive is one of those apps that can only be possible on Android, and not on more closed operating systems like iOS, because of its openness/API richness, which allows them to integrate much deeper with the OS, and to use people’s numbers and social network information to create this Caller ID database.
“With Android, when you have an incoming call you can capture the call management of the telephone and let the user decide which phone application to open [in this case, Contactive will intercept the call to assess the data]. With iPhone, only its own application can open the call and there is no option for another app,” said Contactive’s founder, Iñaki Berenguer.
He also said that Contactive is changing the way people think about Caller ID:
“We’re disrupting the concept of caller ID, which has been around for 20 to 30 years. It is something very simple from a user’s perspective, and it’s simple enough for people to say ‘I want that.'”
Contactive wants to not just show who’s calling you, even when they’re not in your contact list, but also to show you what they’ve been up to lately, by pulling their latest social network updates, and prompting them to you when they’re calling. This can also be very handy if you want to catch-up with what your real friends have been up to lately. If you already have someone’s phone number, chances are he or she is much closer friend than someone you added on Facebook or Google+.
Since Contactive will integrate with your whole contact list, it will also show you what your friends have been up to, and you can be up to date with their activities even before you’d be talking to them on the phone. This should give you more topics to talk about, or even encourage you to call your friends more often, or at least comment on their social networking profiles.
Contactive is a free Caller ID app, that you can get from the Play Store right away, then login with your social networking accounts, and you’re good to go!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kPwTAvWexs
