Just read about Skydeck on TechCrunch. From their site: “Skydeck turns your phone bill into a map of your relationships with friends, colleagues, and customers - your true social network. We show you who called you, whom you need to call, and who never calls back. And since we also keep track of how much you’re spending, you’ll never get a surprise bill again.”
According to Mashable, “Skydeck is a service that essentially scrapes your cell phone bill, and offers up all sorts of information that your wireless provider doesn’t care to share with you”.
I’ve applied for their private beta, and I’m eager to try it out. But let me point out that this won’t work with any Canadian phones — currently they only support Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, Sprint/Nextel, and T-Mobile. (Luckily I’ve got a US T-Mobile account.)
One of the pain points we identified early on in the development of Fonolo was that call history, in its current incarnation is nearly useless. We all receive the multi-page bills in the mail with tiny printing, listing every call by phone number. The unfriendly format means that the useful information contained in that data dump remains trapped on the page.
Skydeck also saw this opportunity and seem to be focusing on two particular (and quite distinct) aspects of that call record data: 1) Understanding/ predicting your bill and 2) Seeing an alternate representation of your social network. I can certainly see the value there. I also like the search feature.
With Fonolo’s focus on consumer-to-business calling, our perspective is slightly different. We wanted it to be easy for a user to answer basic questions like “How many times did I call Acme Corp?”. Today, you would have to scan phone numbers trying to match up Acme’s number. What if Acme has multiple numbers? (For example, maybe you originally called their 800 number, but then followed up by calling a different department directly.) And what about the calls made from your other phones? (Your cell phone, your office phone, etc.)
By using Fonolo to reach Acme, you have an automatic call history generated, regardless of which phone you use. In addition, you have access to recordings of all those calls (if you opt-in) and you can even play back those calls while you’re on the phone with the company! And of course, our Deep Dialing feature means you don’t ever have to navigate Acme’s phone menu.
I’m glad to see other people tackling the challenge of creating useful call history systems, and I see both solutions existing together nicely.
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