“Your most important social network is the one in your phone,” says Skydeck CEO Jason Devitt. With Skydeck, he hopes to do the impossible: turn your cell phone bill into something useful. You give Skydeck the login for your mobile phone account. It scrapes the page and matches the calls with your address book, turning each phone number into a name so that you can sort your phone bill like e-mail. (It’s like Xobni for your cell phone records, see screen shot below). Skydeck tells you who your most important relationships are, based on how often you call someone or they call you. It even tells you which way the relationship is skewed.
The private beta launched today. To get an invite, be one of the first 500 people to sign up here (enter “TechCrunch” in the box labeled ‘Where did you hear about Skydeck?”).
Says Devitt:
We’re trying to introduce information transparency into a market where there is none. All your call records are in your cell phone. We have figured out how to unpack that information, match it to your address book and present you with who your most important relationships are.
Once Skydeck unpacks this information you can start to do interesting things with it, like add tags to calls. Tag all you business calls on your cell phone bill, and you’ve got an expense report. You can sort by name, date, call length, or most expensive call. Skydeck lets you search your call records as easily as you can your e-mail. There is also a Firefox plug-in that keeps tabs on how many mobile minutes you have left this month.
Skydeck raised $1 million in February from angel investors. The service will be free for consumers. Devitt plans to make money by charging small businesses for premium services such as expense management. He also sees an opportunity for promoting other voice-related services such as voicemail transcription.
Devitt plans on adding many more features and services in the future, such as a reverse lookup for numbers not in your address book. The real potential for this, however, is to take that rearranged address book and import it back into your cell phone. “Alphabetical order is a stupid way to organize your address book,” says Devitt. (Unfortunately, you cannot do this yet). Devitt also wants to let people marry the social relationship map Skydeck culls from your cell phone data with your online social networks. Then you could see at a glance who your real friends are. You know, the ones you actually talk to.
Keep an eye on this one. The last startup Devitt founded was Vindigo (mobile city guides). He is a feisty entrepreneur, as you can see from this video below showing him testifying before Congress last September on the importance of open access for wireless networks:
This looks like a winner.
This would be really handy for my business phone, but I’m out of luck. My Company pays for my cell phone and the line I use is through their account, therefore I have no access to my online bill or anything as I would then have access to their accounting information, other people’s lines, etc.
Really sweet idea though.
Do you really need to give them your private information to know who your most important relationships are?
I barely use my phone, and I’ll tell you who my most important relationships are…
My wife and my mom, I hardly call anyone else.
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This looks useful for those of us that make 400+ cell phone calls a month. This data would be particularly interesting if I could combine the results with Xobni type results to get a full picture of my contact with my customers.
could loser #4 please go spam some other site?
at least post something relevant then go in with the spam, ok butt head?
oh, and get your hands out of your pockets in your short (cough … 10 frickin minutes?) video
Good try.
I have Maniac’s SmartJournal on a WM6 handset, and it exports my call records to Outlook as Journal items. They are all searchable and can be played with
Good idea, and very savvy founder based on the video embedded in the post. Great stuff!
I like this guy, A great inspiration to entrepreneurs… This guy will fight anything and anyone to get his product out there…
SkyDeck just confirmed it…I’m a loser. I call my mom and brother more than anyone else.
cool service
Now Skydeck only needs to incorporate some voicemail management tools like the ones on GrandCentral and YouMail!
> I call my mom and brother more than anyone else.
Hey, at least it didn’t tell you that they always have to call you…
AT&T already offers this feature within it’s bill tracking area.
Skypdeck provides only a small portion of GrantCentral. It simply can not win with such thin feature.
the question is, how willing will people be to give out their logins? i mean, giving up a login to a free email service is one thing, but your cell provider contains some fairly sensitive information.
I’m the CEO of Skydeck. Thanks for the great review and the comments. We’ve gotten thousands of requests for invitations to the beta and we’ll add everyone as soon as we can.
@3 and @16, we take privacy and security very seriously and you can read more on our web site. Briefly, we treat your call records the way other companies treat your financial records. You don’t need to give us the login information for your account - our toolbar stores that in your browser and it never gets passed to our servers.
@5 and @12, you are both right. Stay tuned.
Jason