Yesterday, we reported that Robo.to would be releasing an app this fall for iPhone and Android that co-opts your boring "incoming call" screen and presents you with all your caller's relevant social info: last tweets, video posts, status, location and so on. But why would anyone want all that info before picking up the phone?
To answer that question, I spoke to Rey Flemings, CEO of Particle, the Bay Area developer that makes Robo.to. The whole purpose of Robo.to, which is a freestanding service even without the mobile apps, is to have video status updates that supplement all the text. (Left, part of Robo.to's Web interface, which will service as inspiration for the "incoming call" screen on its mobile app.)
"On Twitter, you can see what's happening right now, but the photo you see has nothing do with what's going on right now," says Flemings. Robo.to works in conjunction with almost every major social network, from Twitter to Facebook to Flickr, so it coalesces all that stuff into a palette you can check out before or during a call. "The information you see will still be going on while you're on the call," he says, so while talking to your friend, you might be able to see that they're on vacation in Mexico, or check out a picture of their new dog. "It's conversational lubricant," he says.
Flemings believes that 2010 will be the "year of the forward-facing webcam" on smartphones, and says that Robo.to hopes to use social activity to give context to the interactions you make every day. With that kind of conversational material cued up, it'll be practically impossible to find an awkward moment in any phone call--and that may bring email- and text-addicts back to voice.
Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, Technology, roboto, robo.to, voice call, smartphone, Social Web, network, facebook, twitter, status, location, , Rey Flem, Twitter Inc., Rey Fleming, Rey Flemings, Software |
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Recent Comments | 3 Total
September 22, 2009 at 9:41am by André Leitão
Robo.to firefox
September 22, 2009 at 10:03am by Guy Reiffer
The simple address book tied to a mobile phone is now becoming outdated, especially with so many cross-platform methods of communication now available and being widely used. The concept of the “social address book” has been evolving for a couple of years, and the rapid growth with the push for the aggregation of social networks has been a major catalyst. Colibria has established its own company philosophy with the view that the address book should be an integration point for a user’s communities, effectively organising a person’s life-stream around their contact information. It’s just another form of convergence designed to deliver a better user experience.
The problem is that everyone in the value chain, from operators to handset manufacturers and beyond, are looking for ways to deliver this. This will result in a number of unconnected platforms coming to market, and consumers being forced to choose which one they will use, which doesn’t foster interoperability and penetration. Standardisation to interoperate address books will not be in place for a few years, and no doubt we’ll see a number of companies delivering their solutions before then.
To deliver something that will work for everyone, the industry will need to work to architect a solution that works across platform, operator, country and other variables. It also has to be an intelligent solution to proactively find updates from the various places that a contact may make changes, and update them to the user’s address book.
Robo.to may be on the right track, but it will be interesting to see what other concepts come to the fore in the next year, and more importantly, who takes the lead.