Who Are You?

YouMail is probably best known for our Visual Voicemail Plus application.

As part of that app, we recently added a feature, “visual caller id”, which identifies your missed callers with their name, city/state, and a representative image (such as facebook photo or business logo), even when they’re not in your phone’s address book.

We’re hearing from our users that they love it. In fact, our users love it so much they’ve been hounding us to have visual caller ID for all their calls, not just the ones they don’t answer. We’ve been listening.  And so we’re releasing our second mobile app, “WhoAreYou”, which brings visual caller ID to all incoming calls, not just the missed calls. Our initial, sneak preview version of WhoAreYou (.9) is for Android phones, is completely and totally free, and is now available in the Android Market.

WhoAreYou is really simple to use. Once you download and install it, WhoAreYou automatically pops up a “toast” on all incoming calls as they’re ringing, which shows what it knows about the caller. WhoAreYou can also be run as a stand-alone – letting you easily reverse lookup any number.

But wait, there’s more. WhoAreYou lets users “ditch” callers with a single click, which automatically sends calls from that number to voicemail without ever ringing the phone. It’s effectively very simple call blocking – without having to add new contacts and using Android’s obscure send to voicemail feature. And finally, since it’s our YouMail users who’ve driven us to create WhoAreYou, we made sure WhoAreYou works especially well for the over two million people who already have a YouMail account.   So when a YouMail user ditches calls with WhoAreYou, their callers are automatically played a “this number is out of service” greeting. This makes it really easy to hang up on callers and get automatically taken off of telemarketing lists.

Just a couple of notes.

• At launch, WhoAreYou has information on over 200 million phone numbers, so on any random call, there’s a very good chance it will identify and provide compelling information on telemarketers, spammers, businesses, and for a  lot of personal landlines and cell phone numbers.    However, WhoAreYou Users can upload their contacts and connect to Facebook to help identify even more numbers – so our coverage will get steadily more complete.
• On carriers such as Sprint and Verizon that use CDMA, it’s only possible to do a lookup if the phone has an active 4g or WiFi connection. For these phones, the WhoAreYou is smart enough to do the lookup immediately after the call is answered or sent to voicemail.

Tell us what you think about the app, and what we need to do to improve it before we release version 1.0!