I was one of the principals in MinuteWatcher.

There were several problems: 1) active resistance from some carriers and 2) asking for peoples passwords was bad karma. 3) people don’t like subscription models. 4) There was a Firefox plug-in which heavily loaded the carriers servers, which really stimulated their active resistance.

Since then, at least one company has tried scraping the PDF off the monthly invoice. I like this model because it does not require the service to know about users passwords nor does it generate heavy loads on the carriers servers. You buy a ticket to analyze your invoice n times. When it’s used up, buy another ticket. No subscription.

But there is still a big risk in building a business model in the face of resistance from your data supplier. That was the lesson which convinced me to drop MinuteWatcher.

The idea of the new business model is interesting. But after a second thought it’s still not convincing. Note that all the calling info is just too personal and important to a consumer. Are you going to sell your friends and family’s contacts to a business you don’t know, just for a few dollars a month? Sharing revenue with consumer by compromising their personal data won’t work.

I think the business model is still the biggest issue of this idea. Maybe being acquired is the most possible solution.

I don’t normally check back on comments, but this time I wanted to. Great job answering the questions and addressing everyones concerns here Jason. Honestly, I half expected you to go Bill-O on everyone here, me included. Starting a new site and trying to promote a new idea is always hard, trust me I know. What makes it hard is getting fair and sometimes unfair criticisms. You did great and I honestly think that if you keep working on this idea, something very good can come out of it.

The one thing I found that has helped me in building the site I’m working on. Closed beta in about 2 months, wohooo!!! =) Is that I went and looked at “ALL” of the competitors in detail. I signed up for their service, I played with all their functions and clicked on just about every link I could. At first I would make lists of what I liked and didn’t, but after a while it was all mental notes. So, I would say go look at all the other sites mentioned here. There is nothing wrong with using a great idea (convention) from another site. You don’t necessarily need to make the next big thing, the next great thing is good enough.

Also, have you thought about how you plan on making money. Advertisement is not good enough. Trust me, look at Facebook and the ad spam they run. How the hell is that company worth 9B? Anyway, I was thinking about how you might make money and the idea I came up with is a shared revenue service. You can call it something like “Smart Connect” or hire someone to come up with something more interesting. The idea would be that calling information would be very useful to have. So why not charge for it. You don’t want to charge me or the regular consumer, but rather businesses. A company may be very interested to know who I call, how often and for how long. If you can identify people by profession, interests and so on, that calling information might have some value.

Of course you don’t want your users to feel like you are screwing them over by selling their call or relationship information, so this is where the revenue sharing comes in. Market it, as a way to pay for your cell phone bill or something and tell users they can make money if they opt in. So, Comapny A comes in and buys up the calling history of all 21-40 year old males, in southern California, that make 45K per year and are in the IT industry. For whatever reason. They pay a monthly charge per primary user and per contacts of the primary user. The cost per user is say $1, and $.10 per contact. Give the user the $1 and you keep the rest.

This would work much much better if you can give more pertinent information to the companies. Companies want to know people are, what they want and what will drive them to buy their stuff.

Anyway, just an idea.

Good luck and hope you have some serious success.

@36 and @39: For some people, the Firefox toolbar is the best part of the service – it shows the balance of your voice minutes and text messages each day so that you don’t have to check yourself. For others, they like knowing that their username and password are stored in the browser and never go to Skydeck. Jagan, you don’t need the toolbar to use Skydeck, only to fetch your phone bill, so you could just install it on your home machine. But for you, for all the people who have been burned by rogue toolbars, and for all those poor souls like tchblg who just hate friction, we will offer a path without the toolbar soon.

The way we see it, you don’t really need a history of the 30 times you called your buddy this month. But a history of calls with your bank, airline, etc, could come in very handy. Especially if when you combine that with access to call recordings.

http://www.fonolo.com

I recently had some spare time to think about ideas for a new web site and mobile social networking based on cell phone bills came into my mind. Now you know why I think its a clever idea. However I do not think its a great idea like facebook with open applications.

When I mentioned this idea to a close friend of mine, couple of days back, he said that data is too private for some and would take lot of trust. At first I thought he is totally wrong and on second thought he does have a valid point. The call record data is sensitive for lot of people and they wouldn’t feel comfortable an unknown web site parsing and analyzing the data. Once the site is well known and stands firm against all hacker attacks for an year, probably it creates secure feeling to the end-user. Its a chicken-egg problem.

I haven’t tried the skydeck service yet but the look and feel of the site is great. Nice colors and fonts. Very easy to find information. I would be interested to find where the username/password information will be stored. I am assuming the firefox tool bar stores this information. That would be scary. Atleast something I can’t use at work because I am the kind of that wouldn’t want my work browser to remember/store my passwords permanently.

I am a huge linux/firefox fan but for skydeck to click it has to work with IE very soon.

If I change my phone number and someone else gets my old number, how would this service work for me and for the new person who got my old number.

Good luck.

It is a trivial integration. Poll the client contact info, mash up against your call logs, and create invoices with line items.

Check out our API at http://develope....freshbooks.com

I’ll give you a shout.

I dont like the colors(blue) and the font is too small.

Skydeck helps you keep track of who you actually call and text. We enable you to manage your call records the way that you manage your web mail. And we use that to organize your address book and your network around which of your contacts are important to you and which are not.

Whether or not there are many, we look forward with working with your API cross-promoting with you as we add more content partners.

Benefit to consumer – a social network that actually solves a real problem – helps me get where I need to go, helps me save on gas, lowers my insurance costs (I drive less), and I get to work faster (less traffic/use hov.)
Benefit to Society – reduced traffic
Benefit to Planet – reduced global warming – 30% of CO2 is from vehicles.
Benefit to Verizon – reduced churn/increased loyalty – if I left Verizon, I wouldn’t have access to all the trips/riders/drivers in the Verizon network! OK, I’ll get off my soap box.

Can’t wait to use this.