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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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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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Big in India, Swedish phone directory service Truecaller hits 10M user milestone

David Meyer — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 15:00:32 +0000

Despite the rise of mobile malware, the easiest way for ne’er-do-wells to target phone users is still through old-school scams, such as spam calls. A few years ago, some Swedes set up a service called Truecaller to battle this phenomenon, and today the company is announcing that it’s picked up 10 million users.

Truecaller is an international phone directory of sorts that covers both fixed-line and mobile phones. It picks up numbers in two ways: by partnering with national phone directory services, and by getting users of its apps to upload their own smartphone address books.

The idea is that, when a user sees an incoming call from a number they don’t recognize, they can use Truecaller to check who it is. The company maintains a community-driven list of known spammers, so miscreants get flagged up quickly.

Truecaller spokesman Kim Fai Kok told me on Tuesday that, while the user-base spans 128 countries, the vast majority of those 10 million users reside in India. Although this was initially surprising, it does make sense given the company’s platform trajectory.

“We developed first for Nokia,” he said. “Nokia smartphones have always been big in India, and when people move onto Android and iPhones they bring the good apps with them.”

The service’s popularity in India has not been without controversy, with reports last year pointing out that some senior politicians were in Truecaller’s database despite having unlisted numbers – this was down to the ability of Truecaller’s users to upload their personal address books, which clearly contained those numbers in some cases. That said, the company points out that its customers use numbers to look up names, not vice versa (unless the numbers come from public directories anyway), making this less of an issue than it may at first seem.

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