Mysterious Feature for TrueCaller announced: Picture Caller ID

In December we wrote about TrueCaller – a very advanced caller ID app for Symbian. We also heard that there would be a mysterious feature to be launched in the new year. The makers have contacted us with a press release that explains the new mysterious feature. There was suspicion that it would be related to the newly released push API but actually it’s

PICTURE CALLER ID. Yeah that’s right. Not just your number, but your PHOTO. Screenshot provided uses iPhone :s.

You can check out True Caller at Ovi Store. I’m assuming the new feature is already there:

store.ovi.com/content/13329?

Swedish entrepreneur behind the service TrueCaller presented a new functionality for their mobile caller id. TrueCaller has in cooperation with directory services worldwide distributed information to its users for 1½ year. The service already has over 800 000 users performing well over 35 million searches per month. TrueCaller users have since start been able to see name and address information belonging to a certain number. But as of today, users will even be able to see a picture of the person who’s name or number they have looked up. TrueCaller is the first service in the world able to offer picture caller id.
A picture is worth a thousand words
According to the founders Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam this progress is a logical evolution within this field.
”We constantly try to work with innovative angles of improving the areas we’ve noticed as troublesome. One very common problem has been that seeing the name of someone is at times not enough information to be able to associate a person to a specific number, even whit address information. By performing well defined user-experience research we were able to determine that the best solution to fill in the gap for lack of association is by taking advantage of the possibilities given by pictures.”
The founders realized early on that it’s not enough to perform a simple person search on Facebook. Instead Alan and Nami worked on an intelligent method with which they could, with high accuracy, reveal a picture of a person or number searched for through

TrueCaller.
TrueCaller is now ready to display pictures of thousands and thousands of lookups which in short will become millions!

I’ll be very interested to see this in action. It was surprising enough to see TrueCaller work and bring up caller ID of the person calling (including name/country) but to have your photo as well? Facebook might be a good resource for this – I wonder how they decide if it’s your face (especially if you’re in a group of friends).

Category: Applications, Nokia, Symbian