Dial Plus is a new service in public alpha looking to provide cellphone users with instant access to data relevant to the phone numbers they call.
Upon dialing or receiving calls from businesses, users are presented with directions, business hours, and/or menus. During personal calls, the service fetches contact profiles from social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.
At first glance, the concept seems a little useless. I’ve never really had an urge to read through a friend’s Facebook profile while I was chatting on the phone, and unless you have a headset, it’s going to be tough to browse anything while chatting. The company’s demo video isn’t too convincing, either (it’s also painfully similar to the ubiquitous iPhone ads).
But after seeing Dial Plus in person, I think that the platform has some potential – it felt nice having the phone look things up for me automatically in the background, and made me question why smartphones don’t do this already. If Dial Plus can get enough developer support for the planned widget platform, the service has a chance to do well for itself.
The company has high hopes but a long way to go. Currently available are alpha versions of the software running on Windows Mobile phones, with support for platforms including the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry on the way. Users must download a thin client, but all information is provided through the phone’s native browser.
Dial Plus is going to need to provide a complete product very quickly if they want to succeed. A number of other companies including Korean startup Callgate are already well-established and offer some of the same features. And with the release of the iPhone SDK and Android, we’re going to see this space fill up pretty quickly.
It’s like thePudding except it’s an application on a phone and it doesn’t search profiles, right? Also it’sprobably not free.
@David
The service is free for now. It will be supported by contextual ads.
This sorta reminds me of the ADSI enhanced phone services that was available to certain ISDN capable phones in the 1990’s.
@David:
It seems the biggest distinction between DialPlus and the Pudding is that Pudding requires a user to launch the browser, go to their website, and enter the phone number to make the call. DialPlus doesn’t change any behavior. When a call is made or is incoming, it brings up Smart Results for the user.
Also, isn’t the pudding slightly over the top big-brother given the fact that it actually listens to your conversation?
Plus it misses all incoming calls.
DialPlus is free. DialPlus will be able to serve ads in the Smart Results on every call that a phone makes or receives. These ads can be contextual based on demographic and psychographic profiles for each user. It seems to me a much easier and useful experience than what I’ve seen from pudding.
This sounds like a really good idea. With the ubiquity of Bluetooth and headsets, it seems like a relatively simple transition to accepting the cellphone as a platform for simultaneous voice and data. Also, as a compulsive FaceBook checker, this product is right in my sweet spot. I think there is a real practical value in getting the business data, and the more social networking sites they support, the more of a crucial youth market they will be able to pull in. I’ll be very interested to see how DialPlus moves forward.
its a great idea if you can type other words/names in while you are on the phone (yeah headset required) so that you can look things up while on the convo. many many times i’ve wanted to look someone up after seeing their nametag before talking to them, or someone calls and mentions a name and i’m not yet familiar with it – i want to get familiar with it instantly with wiki lookup (not facebook that’s damn near useless), website lookup, linkedin profile…
then in the future (near future) they should hook it to phonecam with face recognition lookups. then in the slightly farther future – we become Terminators.