Want to be smarter on the phone? CallApp’s 500 million phone numbers can help

It’s something most people in business experience daily: talking on the phone with someone you don’t really know. Would you get better results if you knew more about the people on the other end of the line?

That’s the premise of CallApp, which is presenting at the DEMO conference in Santa Clara today.

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“What we call ‘smartphone’ might be smart, might be a phone, but it’s definitely not a smartphone,” said chief executive Oded Volovitz at the conference.

The app is simple in theory: Collect all the phone numbers you can find, connect them to publicly available social media profiles, and present the information to users on their smartphone screens while talking. But with 500 million phone numbers and counting in the “universal crowdsourced” social contact book,” it obviously has some significant computational complexity.

“It seems to have a lot of powerful features, but I think perhaps the name of the company is a little too narrow in what they’re trying to address,” said Mark Sugarman of MHS Capital at the DEMO Conference. “They need to do a better job describing what the actual application does.”

According to Volovitz, CallApp helps users make better use of their time:

“CallApp provides you with the information and tools you need to make better decisions and seize more exciting opportunities,” he told VentureBeat. “It helps you avoid wasting time on calls that don’t matter and to become more productive on the ones that do.”

Users seem to agree.

In the first 1o days on the app store, 25,000 people downloaded the app and used it over a million times, Volovitz says. Even better, they continue to use the app, with the average person accessing it over 500 times a month, according to Volovitz.

That’s huge engagement, massive loyalty, and — to use a somewhat old-fashioned phrase — incredible stickiness. The obvious insight: people who download CallApp are using it for every call.

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CallApp is available on Android right now, and an iPhone app is just now in testing.

Founded in 2011, CallApp has raised over a million dollars from angel investor Moshe Lichtman, a former president of a Microsoft division, and Giza Venture Capital.

photo credit: splorp via photopin cc

CallApp is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

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