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Caller ID outfit Truecaller doubles user base to 20M in under 5 months

David Meyer — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 10:00:19 +0000

The Swedish caller ID and blocking service Truecaller, which has proven particularly big in India, has been around since 2009. However, the company’s growth has been particularly impressive of late.

Back in January we reported that Truecaller had amassed 10 million users. On Wednesday, the firm said it had hit 20 million – that’s twice as many users in just under 5 months.

Truecaller is effectively a huge, international reverse-lookup phone directory. Its data is derived from official phonebook services and also from users’ personal phonebooks, and is generally used to combat spam callers and telemarketers.

Last month, the firm opened up an API to let third-party developers tap into this resource, which was 600 million numbers strong at the time. “We’ve received more than a couple of thousands of requests, and we have some really cool cases that we are looking forward to closing soon,” a company spokesman told me this morning.

The spokesman added that, although growth is happening around the world, India was still the company’s biggest market, with the app having recently received a fair number of celebrity endorsements. Fair enough – I imagine famous actors and sportspeople must sometimes get a few annoying calls from strangers.

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Impacts of the IBM-SoftLayer deal on the cloud industry

Larry Carvalho — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 06:55:24 +0000

On June 4 IBM acquired cloud computing infrastructure provider SoftLayer. This report analyzes the deal and discusses how the greater IT ecosystem will be affected and the benefits and challenges IBM now faces.

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The new building blocks for IT: OpenStack, continuous delivery, and devops

Fri, 31 May 2013 06:55:01 +0000

The key building blocks of a modern IT organization include a highly flexible infrastructure, an automated software delivery life cycle, and a devops-driven IT organization. This report focuses in particular on OpenStack as an underlying cloud platform to support this new type of organization. It defines the continuous delivery approach, addresses the benefits as well as disadvantages of OpenStack, and, finally, discusses the role of devops.

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Truecaller API lets third parties tap into database of 600M phone numbers

David Meyer — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:33:27 +0000

Remember Truecaller, the Swedish phone directory service we reported on earlier this year? It’s a service for combatting phone scams – the user gets to see who’s calling them, with Truecaller identifying the caller by their phone number. It’s big in India, apparently.

Anyway, Truecaller now has 600 million partly crowdsourced names and phone numbers in its database, which is quite a lot, and it’s decided to open up this information to third parties that can make good use of it. “Great,” you might think, “what a boon to telemarketers.” But no, Truecaller is rather sensibly hand-picking those developers who get to tap into its newly-launched, 3scale-managed API, and telemarketers are not welcome at all.

As for potential uses for this reverse lookup service, that’s up to the developer’s imagination. Here’s what Truecaller CEO Alan Mamedi suggests:

“Among many other scenarios, the Truecaller API could be used to save time in call centres. Each call centre minute is connected to a cost. By using our API, both local and global, call centres can identify who is calling even before starting the call. Win-win.”

Truecaller’s database is populated by two main sources: traditional phone directory services and users who are willing to upload their address books. This latter source means it can contain numbers that are unlisted, including pay-as-you-go phone numbers. Numbers in the database come with two types of scores: a “spam score” to rate how likely it is that they are associated with telesales or robocalls, and a “true score” to denote importance.

Importantly, name search will not be a function associated with the API – it will only be available on the mobile app, meaning the API can only be used for reverse lookup purposes.

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Cloudbase.io launches shared API to help mobile apps get connected

David Meyer — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:00:08 +0000

Kids these days! There they are, creating all their little mobile apps, yet too many of them aren’t considering the possibilities provided by connections to other apps. That, at least, is the view of Cloudbase.io founder Stefano Buliani, whose London-based backend-as-a-service (BaaS) outfit wants to make it easier to both plug in and cash in.

As part of reaching that objective, Cloudbase.io has launched a shared API to encourage data-sharing between apps. By way of example, someone coming up with a Foursquare-like idea could decide to use Cloudbase.io to build their application. Cloudbase.io would handle the backend for that app, and the developer could tell the BaaS provider to let other apps access their shared API, allowing those apps to draw on the app’s check-in data and creating opportunities for business deals down the line.

As Buliani told me:

“What I found everywhere [as I was promoting] Cloudbase.io was that everybody with a background as a backend developer instantly got it. Mobile developers were questioning the need for their application to be connected to the internet. Most mobile developers are only mobile developers; they’ve never done anything else before – never worked on websites, for example. They had this mentality of building the small game for mobile.

“The premise for the idea is that we want mobile applications to become platforms. We want them to be able to publish their own layer of APIs, even though it’s hosted on Cloudbase.io. Cloudbase.io becomes invisible in the background. We want to encourage them to be as ambitious as possible and think of themselves as a platform. It’s a chicken-and-egg game of course – what came first, the business or the API? – but we want them to be prepared for it.”

This perspective is unsurprising coming from Buliani, a developer (he was part of the early Covestor team) who became a management consultant in London’s financial heart before returning to tech. But then again, Cloudbase.io is not the only company trying to help smalltime developers think bigger.

So what about rivals such as Parse? According to Buliani, there’s a “philosophical difference” between the two outfits.

“The easiest example is, if you want to build an application on top of Parse you have to register the users of your application within that framework, so your application will have to have authentication. With Cloudbase.io you can have no authentication — it’s entirely up to you,” he said, adding that he was proud of the fact that all of Cloudbase.io’s libraries are open source and available on Github.

Of course, Cloudbase.io’s new service also crosses over somewhat with the territory of API management specialists such as Apigee and 3scale.

As with Parse, it’s free to register with Cloudbase.io and get going. Once the app’s in an app store, users need to start paying – the most basic account costs $11.99 a month, which comes with a gigabyte of data exchange. Above that are professional ($47.99 for 8GB) and enterprise ($119.99 for 20GB) tiers, with the possibility of negotiated pricing for higher volumes.

Users should take note of how data exchange volume pricing works with the shared API. If the app accessing data from the original, Cloudbase.io-using app is also using the same BaaS platform, it’s that second app that gets charged. If the second app is off-platform, it will obviously be the original app’s developers who get charged (it might be smart to publish the shared API but keep it password protected).

Incidentally, for those developers who need as much help as possible, Cloudbase.io also partnered up last month with MoSync, a provider of open-source tools for building mobile applications. The idea there is for MoSync to allow the building and compiling of the apps, with Cloudbase.io adding in the connectivity, geo-location and social pieces.

(And on another note, cloud infrastructure and data-sharing will definitely be on the agenda for discussion at our Structure:Europe conference, which will run in London on September 18-19.)

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Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013

Mark Mulligan — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:54:59 +0000

Content owners, whether they are publishers, retailers, or marketers, are always looking for new ways to deliver a unique experience to their customers. We call this content personalization. Key trends in this area are led by a collection of technologies that we call post-programming curation. These technologies use the best of behavioral tracking, collaborative filtering, audience targeting, and dynamic content presentation.

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Twitter plays its platform hand, and it is the one holding all the Cards

Mathew Ingram — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 17:54:07 +0000

We’ve written before about the evolution that Twitter has been trying to engineer over the past year or so — transforming itself from a network with an open ecosystem into one that is much more controlled, a change that has led to much criticism and unease. The latest step in that process came Tuesday, with the launch of new features for Twitter’s “Cards,” which allow certain services to add extra content to expanded tweets. While many developers have greeted them with open arms, the future of Cards as a platform is one in which Twitter is firmly in control, and that comes with some obvious risks.

As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in her post on the new features, Twitter has given third-party apps the ability to add “deep links” to content inside a tweet, so that — for example — if a user includes a link to a photo from Path or Flickr and someone reading that tweet has the Path app or the Flickr app installed on their device, clicking the link launches that app and takes them directly to the content (a link to a download page for the app can also be included).

Twitter can help with app discovery

The benefits of these new features are clear, as Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures (one of Twitter’s backers) and others have noted. For services like Path, one of the hardest problems is discovery — in other words, letting people know it exists, and also making it easy for users to find interesting content within the app. Twitter’s new Card features provide a potential solution for both of those problems, and since the social network has an active-user base of close to 250 million, it could give some services a substantial boost.

Really excited to integrate the new @twitter cards into @circa. This will be a game changer for app distribution.
—
Matt Galligan (@mg) April 03, 2013

The downside of this approach should also be obvious, however, especially if you notice that among Twitter’s partners for these new features there are names like Path and Flickr, but no Instagram. Why isn’t the largest photo-sharing service included? Because it is owned by Facebook, and Twitter cut off the app’s access to a key feature last year — namely, the ability for users to find Twitter friends who also use the service — and Instagram subsequently removed Card support. The company also cut off Tumblr’s access to the same feature, even though Tumblr was an early partner on the Cards rollout.

This is the fundamental difference between Twitter’s current approach to being a platform and its previous approach. In the early days of the service, up until mid-2011, Twitter seemed happy to be at the center of a more or less open ecosystem — one which allowed virtually anyone to make use of the company’s APIs to display or make use of tweets. Many services and apps (including Instagram) grew by piggy-backing on the network in this way.

Then came what one Twitter investor has called a “holy s*** moment”: Bill Gross — founder of what was then called Uber Media — started buying up Twitter clients (including an attempt to buy Tweetdeck, which Twitter ultimately acquired) and appeared to be preparing to launch his own network, one that would make use of tweets combined with a third-party advertising model.

Twitter’s control is a double-edged sword

These moves by Gross and others posed a clear threat to Twitter’s ability to monetize its growing user base — something that was becoming more and more crucial given the multibillion-dollar market value the company had developed after several rounds of financing. So the company started tightening the screws around its network: restricting access to the API, changing what were display “guidelines” into “requirements,” and generally exerting much more control over who got access to the company’s data.

Such decisions caused a firestorm of controversy in the third-party developer community, with some complaining that Twitter had “killed” their businesses. Now, the company is clearly trying to repair some of that damaged goodwill by offering third-party apps and services preferential access to the network, and features like Card deep links — replacing the open ecosystem approach with one that is more a velvet rope: only official partners allowed.

This approach makes sense for Twitter, since it needs to generate revenue from its network, and presumably intends (or theoretically could) collect fees from partners for the additional features they are getting with Twitter Cards, which can also include music links and other content. And as noted above, it makes sense for apps and services like Path to cut a deal in order to get more reach — but just like building integration into Facebook or Apple or any other controlled ecosystem, developers should be aware this is a double-edged sword.

In other words, such an arrangement will likely look like a win-win so long as Twitter thinks you are beneficial to its network. The minute it sees you as competition, it will suddenly become lose-lose — and whatever you have invested in that ecosystem will vanish.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Ljupo Smokovski and Flickr user Rosauro Ochoa

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Facing Facebook opposition, Yandex presses pause on Wonder

David Meyer — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 11:18:39 +0000

When Facebook says no, that means no. After launching a beta version of its Wonder app, which aims to give users voice-driven access to information about their contacts’ activities across various social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, Yandex has put the app on hold.

When Wonder launched in the U.S., Russia’s Yandex was keen to maintain that it wasn’t a ‘search engine’ – it just helped people search for information from within specific networks. Facebook, which recently launched its own network search capabilities, didn’t see things that way, and shut off its Graph API
to Wonder almost immediately.

“It was confirmed that Facebook views the application Wonder as something that violates the Facebook Platform Policies and that the access to Facebook’s Graph API will not be restored,” Yandex said in a statement on Wednesday.

“Wonder’s functioning, in its current state, as well as the quality of user experience it provides, largely depends on the access to Facebook’s Graph API. Since this access was revoked, we decided to put our application on hold for the time being.”

Yandex went on to say it was considering partnership opportunities with other social networks. But really, without Facebook the app has a big hole in it for many if not most users.

Which is a shame, given that Wonder is all about letting users search across the data and human connections that they themselves have donated to Facebook and others. That’s not how Facebook sees it, though, so – at least for now – end of story.

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App.net to launch file storage API so you can host your own photos

Eliza Kern — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 18:30:57 +0000

Needless to say, photo ownership is a sticky topic. Just ask all the people who left Instagram in December over Instagram’s terms of service and the question of photo ownership and rights.

So not surprisingly, one of the biggest champions of personal data ownership and paid services when it comes to social networks is forging an experiment in file storage and ownership. Dalton Caldwell plans to announced Monday that App.net will be launching a file storage API, giving each of its existing users 10 GB of file storage space connected with their accounts, so they can personally host their own photos and files and then authorize App.net apps to access those files.

App.net launched in the summer of 2012, and it’s still a little unclear exactly how Caldwell’s vision for the network is going to play out. He is currently committed to a paid network strategy where users have access to all the apps created on top of the App.net API, including everything from group texting apps to a network that looks pretty much like Twitter. Developers are paid from users subscription fees based on the popularity of the apps developers build.

Central to Caldwell’s thesis is that a paid network creates more value for the developers and gives users more ownership over their data and information. For instance, if you have an Instagram or Flickr account, you upload photos to the services which are then hosted on those companies servers even if you retain copies of the photos yourself. With App.net’s storage API, you would host your own photos in the cloud, and give authorization to different apps to access your photos (just as you give an app access to photos on your iPhone’s camera roll, for instance.)

“It’s like your personal Dropbox,” Caldwell said. “You want to maintain the originals and feel like they’re yours.” He noted that allowing for photo and file apps will be an important part of growing the App.net developer network, which is now fairly focused on text-based apps.

Caldwell said he thinks moving into photo and file storage will provide App.net developers a good deal of flexibility in what they design with the service’s API, and moves App.net into a potentially more useful and lucrative area for both users and developers.

“It’s an attempt to get away from some of the downsides of a siloed data storage,” he said.

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Twitter keeps focus on marketing, analytics partners with Certified Products

Eliza Kern — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 20:22:53 +0000

Twitter announced Thursday that it’s continued adding brands to its “Certified Products Program,” picking which developers and products working with its API can serve Twitter customers in particular areas, primarily marketing and analytics. The additions reinforce where Twitter is looking to partner, and how it’s continuing to grow as a service for other businesses on its own path toward monetization.

Twitter first began adding products to the Certified Products list this summer, and we explained the rationale behind the program:

This summer, the developer community has been consumed with the question of which apps using the Twitter API will keep the company’s approval and survive, and which will be shut down for conflicting with Twitter’s interests. Twitter first began to distinguish between apps with its August blog post, laying out its priorities in four quadrants and placing an emphasis on businesses over consumers and analytics over engagement.

The company has been steadily moving to monetize its product and become more brand-friendly this summer, so this support for business-oriented apps make sense.

The new products include companies that let brands manage their Twitter accounts (Shoutlet, Spredfast and Sprout Social), help marketers understand Twitter activity (Adobe Social), help brands create tweets that work with their audience (Percolate and Rallyverse), and help companies measure reactions and activity by users on Twitter (Sysomos, Simply Measured and Visible Technologies).

This summer, Twitter divvied up developers and their apps into four quadrants on a Twitter chart of approval, showing which ones Twitter likes and which ones it will discourage (aka the upper-right quadrant of doom). So the new additions are a good reminder — analytics and marketing apps built for businesses are in a good place.

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