‘Social’ phones to reveal all about your caller
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco | Published: September 20 2009
Forget caller ID. A coming wave of “social” mobile phones is likely to tell you everything you ever wanted to know and more about the person calling you.
An application called Robo.to, available in the fourth quarter on the iPhone and handsets that run Google’s Android operating system, offers a stream of information about callers, including personal videos, photos and their current location.It is an example of the “social address book” – the reinvention of a core handset feature that carriers will leverage to earn fresh revenues and win back consumer attention lost to iPhone applications and media companies’ services.
With Robo.to, when the phone rings, a user can see a video recorded by the caller as a “status update” that shows their mood and where they are.
The screen can also feature their latest Twitter messages, their name and title from the Linkedin professional network, recent photos posted to the Flickr photo service and a map of their location.
Rey Flemings, chief executive of Particle, Robo.to’s parent company, says the service should come into its own in 2010 as more phones feature a forward-facing camera for video calls.
Handset makers are also seizing on the popularity of social networks to make their phones more appealing. Motorola’s latest phone, the Cliq, features “Motoblur” software that merges tweets, e-mail and Facebook status messages under the address book listings of contacts. Motorola described the Cliq, or Dext as it will be known in Europe, as “the first phone with social skills” when it unveiled it this month.
However, the Cliq was preceded by another Android phone, the HTC Hero, which has HTC Sense software. This has a similar interface to Motoblur, grouping photos, e-mails and status updates with a contact’s information in its address book.
In July, Nokia bought the German company Cellity, which had developed a “phonebook 2.0” product merging contact information with social networks.
Handset makers are aiming to meet the priorities of carriers with the new capabilities. The merging of information draws users into using more multimedia and data to update their networks, increasing revenues.
“Carriers want to help users socialise their address books. That’s the big 2010 emphasis for them as it unlocks so much power,” says one industry executive.
“The carriers know your current location, who your friends are and what media you are consuming, so this will open up the advertising business for them.”
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Tags: Robo.to, social mobile phones, telecommunications market news
