DEMO: CallSpark Looks To Be Your Phone's Ultimate Contact Database

Our phones are smarter than ever, but figuring out a business’s or personal contact’s phone number can still be a trying task — especially when this data can be scattered across multiple address books, Facebook profiles, and professional contact management tools. CallSpark is a new startup that’s making its debut at DEMO Fall that’s looking to help solve this problem. The company has an iPhone application that will be out soon, with plans to support more platforms in the near future.

First, the company looks to help find a phone number quickly, using data from Yelp, the white pages, yellow pages, and other sources. You can run a keyword search to find matches in your vicinity — for example, a search for ‘Hyatt’ would find the phone number for the most relevant Hyatt hotel in the area. It isn’t clear how this is better than what you get using the iPhone’s integrated Google Maps functionality, which also makes it easy to look up a phone number, but the app does have a number of other interesting features.

The second thing that CallSpark offers is the abillity to import information from sources like your company’s Salesforce account. You can use this information as an address book, as well as to look up details about a contact during a call (beyond contact information, CallSpark can include content from sites like Twitter and Facebook).

Another use case for CallSpark is to locate contact information that would typically be buried in your Email. Say, for example, your friend had sent his new phone number to your Email account but you had yet to enter it into your address book. CallSpark will automatically identify the number in the mail message, and include it as a match next time you run a search on your contact’s name.

Finally, CallSpark offers something called ‘Ring Pages’, which lets companies and individuals create a default website that users should see when they call their number using CallSpark. For example, a FedEx RingPage might include links to track your packages, or find the nearest FedEx locations.

CallSpark says it will soon be announcing a ‘large carrier deal’. Carrier deals may well be key to CallSpark’s success, as it’s unlikely the company will have much luck getting businesses to build Ring Pages if the app doesn’t have a considerable user base.