Your Tech Story

truecaller

Truecaller

Truecaller Launches ‘Open Doors’ Inspired From Clubhouse: How it works

Truecaller has released Open Doors, a clubhouse-style private audio communication app. You can start a chat, and your friends will be notified when they can join. When they join, their friends will be notified, and they will be able to join as well. As a result, as you can see, the number of people participating in the chat expands due to the network effect. Truecaller has a large cache and user base to promote this network effect, with over 300 million daily active users. Most certainly, you are one of those users. So, if you’re intrigued about Open Doors, we’ve got the essential information for you right here.

What Is Open Doors?

Open Doors is a free social media program in which players engage with others solely through voice. In that way, it could be regarded as a Clubhouse substitute. True Software Scandinavia AB, the parent firm of Truecaller, Caller ID, and spam prevention service, created it. The app’s user interface is currently available in English, Hindi, Spanish, Latin, and French. In the future, other languages will be introduced. The software provides a communication platform that both existing Truecaller users and new users can use to initiate and join audio chats. These audio discussions will then invite more people through the ‘network effect,’ as Truecaller refers to it.

Truecaller
Image source: static.tnn.in

How does It work?

If you are already a Truecaller user, you may sign in with only one tap, the business says in the news release. A missed call or an OTP will be used to verify your phone number if you don’t enter it first. Additionally, you must allow two permissions: phone permission and contacts permission (for the network effect) (to conduct audio conversations). In case you’re worried, the firm assures you that the other party in the conversation won’t see your phone number. Again, you are free to start and stop a chat whenever you like. Notifications to join the chat will be sent to your friends (contacts), as well as to their friends. A link to someone wanting to join the chat can be shared by anyone participating in it.

Is It Safe?

It’s noteworthy to note that during a chat, only the participants’ names and profile photographs are shown; phone numbers are not displayed. Additionally, users have total control over their personal data because the program only needs two permissions. Other features include the ability to customize who receives notifications when you join a conversation and the ability to respond to what others are saying. Additionally, the app will provide users fine-grained control over how it alerts them to new Open Doors talks.

Both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store will provide Open Doors at no charge. The seamless app experience across both platforms, according to Truecaller, is another boast. The group chats will be moderated by the Open Doors community, but the private talks will remain private and will not be stored anywhere.

Thanks to Truecaller being 13 years in the business, we’ve spent a great deal of time learning about how people communicate. Our new app Open Doors was born out of a simple question – how can we help people make new connections without being intrusive? And this is what we want to do: to bridge the world using the most natural form of communication, our voices.” said Nami Zarringhalam, Co-founder of True Software Scandinavia AB.

Source: digit.in

It’s interesting to see truecaller release this app at a time when others, like clubhouse, seem to have fizzled out and the majority of people use Twitter spaces for similar discussions. Therefore, it will be difficult to remain relevant in a declining industry.

Guardian

Guardian Personal Safety App launched by Truecaller for location sharing with specific contacts

Only a few days before International Women’s Day, the caller ID platform, Truecaller launched its new application called Guardian. This new app will allow the users to share their location only with specific contacts so that the guardians will receive notification about the user’s location and alerts during any emergency. This new app will not share any personal information with any other third-party app for commercial purposes which also includes Truecaller itself.

This new app by Truecaller has been launched on 3rd March 2021. According to Truecaller, the Guardian app is an in-house built product. Efforts of team members from Sweden and India for the past fifteen months have finally helped in developing the app. If you already have a Truecaller account you can sign in with that in Guardian or you can use your mobile number to sign up. If you aren’t a Truecaller user, then an OTP or a missed call will be generated to verify the mobile number.

The Guardian App

To use the Guardian app, there are only three pieces of information that are required from the user’s end, namely, the user’s contact log, phone permission, and location. The Guardian app doesn’t have any premium model so it is free to use for everyone. The app will not show any ads as well, the company says. In the future, Truecaller plans to add a shortcut for downloading the Guardian app from the Truecaller app so that more people can download and use it. The main motive behind building the Guardian app is to crowdsource personal safety like we crowdsource protection against scams and frauds with the help of Truecaller, said Alan Mamedi, CEO and co-founder of True Software Scandinavia AB (parent company of Truecaller).

Alan also said that he believes the company has the right tool and conviction to make Guardian a success. The best thing about using the Guardian app is that there is only one model for the app which is free. So, the company to some extent is putting more focus on safety than business growth. This is a truly good initiative taken by Truecaller as the app will work with police as well.

How will the App Work?

Guardian app will provide a huge degree of customization to the users as they will get to select the specific contacts with whom the former want to share the location. There will also be options of when to start and stop sharing location. Along with that, the users can also share the location permanently with some contacts. Suppose a user shares the location with the selected contacts in a particular trip, it will keep working in the background. The app will also notify the selected contacts and help them follow the location precisely during any emergency.

Guardian
Image Source: themobileindian.com

Closely following the location will not be enabled in any normal scenario to preserve the battery. Apart from the user’s location, the app will also notify the remaining battery life and network strength to the selected guardians. The app is compatible with an arrangement where the user’s and the guardian’s phone run on different OS (Android and iOS). The users will also be able to call or text the selected contacts once the location is shared only with one tap.

Community Guardians Feature

Truecaller’s Guardian app also plans to launch a feature called Community Guardian. This feature will be useful once the emergency mode has been enabled by the user so that the community guardians in the user’s vicinity can help the user. This will help in crowdsourcing personal safety and help traveling much easier for women. The community guardian feature will help the user receive support from other contacts that are not selected by the user. Truecaller is also trying to involve local law enforcement officials to make the app more effective. This app is designed mainly for ensuring women’s safety, but any user can download and use the app.

Alan also focuses on data sharing as he mentions that no personal data will be stored or shared for commercial purposes. Data will be directly streamed to the client and it will not even touch the platform’s infrastructure. The app is now available in Google Play and soon it will be available on App Store. The company doesn’t have any plan to commercialize the app ever even after it is successful.

Alan Mamedi : The Person Who Made the Phonebook of a Smartphone Smarter

The telephone is the most useful invention by humans. The era changed and brought the revolution in the telephone industry, jumping from two-piece landlines to a chordless smartphone. But, one thing that was constant, the reception of blank calls and cold calls. Even at the time of landlines, people could not identify the caller, as there was no medium that could show the identity of the caller. But, yes, later on, the caller Ids, did help to an extent. However, it was still impossible to recognise the callers from the new numbers. The same problem remained in the time of the mobiles and smartphones as well. But, Alan Mamedi, a developer from Sweden, came to the rescue and gifted the much-awaited app Truecaller to the world.

Early Life

Mamedi was born on 30 October 1984, in an Iranian family. His mother was a Kurd, and his father was an Iranian political leader. After the Iranian revolution took place, his family brought him to Sweden. He was a bright student and completed a B.sc degree in Computer Science, from The Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm Sweden.

Alan Mamedi
Image Source: techinasia.com

After completing his education, Mamedi started working as a Salesman at The Phone House and stayed at the same company for two years. With an experience of two years and a graduate degree in Computer Science, Mamedi got inspired to start his own company. In 2006, Mamedi founded ‘Bidding.se’, an auction website, where the one with the lowest bid would win the auction. The website was a success, and Mamedi received an offer to sell it, within three months of its launch.

In 2007, Mamedi again came with another product, Möbeljakt.se, that became the largest search engine, working in Sweden, for the home interior. In 2008, he started working as the Chief Architect at Birdstep Technology and Företagsinformation i Mediaportalen, at the same position, for the next two years.

In 2009, Mamedi launched Jobbigt.se, an employer review website, known to be the biggest employer network in Sweden. Through the website, people could post reviews about their current or previous employers.

Founding Truecaller

After the launch of Jobbigt.se, Mamedi started receiving calls from those employers, who had got bad reviews on Jobbigt.se. The employers wanted Mamedi to delete those bad reviews as those were affecting their reputation.

This incident made Mamedi, think and discuss the matter with his old friend Nami Zarringhalam, as he was receiving unlimited calls regarding the same. The discussion also included the issue of increasing cold-calls, invading the privacy of people. At the time, there was no such software that could help in avoiding those kinds of calls and identify the new numbers. The two came to the conclusion that there must be a software that can handle those issues. The software must have a caller ID so that people could decide the priority of the call. With the intense discussion, Mamedi and Zarringhalam finally decided to create a new app; Truecaller.

On 1 July 2009, Mamedi released the initial version of Truecaller, under the name of his company True Software Scandinavia AB. The company was founded by Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam in the same year and is situated in Stockholm, Sweden.

Initially, the app was launched for the BlackBerry smartphones, but due to huge success, it was also released for the Symbian and Microsoft Windows mobile phones. On 23 September 2009, the app became available for the iOS and Android phone users. By the year 2012, it was also launched for the RIM Blackberry, Windows Phone, and the Nokia Series 40, and it grew to five million global users in the same year.

Truecaller in 2012, received US$1.3 million funding from OpenOcean, a venture capital. In 2014, it also received an investment of $18.8 million from Sequoia Capital and $60 million from Niklas Zennstrom’s Atomico investment firm and from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Due to the increased user base in India, Truecaller also launched another app, exclusively for India, with name Truemessenger, that can identify the sender of a message.

Truecaller adds support for video calling and e-payments

Truecaller, the Sweden-based startup, is quite popular among smartphone users as an alternative to their boring default dialer app. The ability to identify and filter out spam calls makes it the first choice for million of smartphone users worldwide. On Tuesday, at its first annual ‘Stay Ahead’ event in Delhi, Truecaller announced its intention of transforming the brand from a service oriented app to a platform by launching its completely redesigned Android App- Truecaller 8.

At the event, company representatives openly spoke about their future goals highlighting their partnership with Google and ICICI, an Indian Bank in order to integrate video calling and e-payment functionality into new Truecaller app. Alongside these tie-ins, Trucaller decided to integrate its True messenger app with their dialer to bring spam free messaging functionality to its customers.

According to Alan Mamedi, chief executive officer and co-founder, Truecaller: “Spam SMS account for 15% of all SMS messages sent globally, and represents 1.2 trillion spam messages each year. On average, every spam call is about 40 seconds long, so we will help save a lot of time.” On top of it, now users can send flash messages-from a pre-written text library-in just 2 steps. This will be extremely helpful in situations when you are busy or stuck somewhere; just in 2 seconds you can send a flash message to inform someone.

Truecaller Pay is an addition to the list of features as a result of their partnership with ICICI in India. This allows Truecaller India users to send and receive money electronically via their android smartphones. ICICI Bank is providing the technology required to for such services.

“This is based on the feedback received from the market that users wanted to be able to make a transaction straight from their Truecaller app”, said Nami Zarringhalam, CSO and co-founder Truecaller.

The company also tied up with Google to integrate Google Duo, a video calling service, with the app itself. This functionality will be available in next few months for both Android and iOS users. According to Google, the deal aligns with their aim to make video calling simpler, faster and available to everyone.

Truecaller has also launched extended the caller identification for Indian subscribers of telecom operator Airtel where even people with feature phones would be able to use caller ID feature some other features. Airtel’s non-data users will also be able to identify spam calls with this new feature informing them by a flash message prior to the call. This unique way of extending services allows users to get online experience without subscribing to a data pack or buying a smartphone.

Truecaller is not the only company attacking e-payment opportunity in India. In his last visit to India, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton revealed his plans to tap into commercial messaging and digital payment whenever it’s the right time. Hike is another major player in the game with a strong focus on improving quality messaging supplemented with support of regular news, games and stickers.