Smart Calls, a New Way to Make and Receive Phone Calls

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A few days ago I met Stuart Henshall, one of the minds behind Phweet, a service I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. I don’t want to repeat what I already wrote about Phweet, but I only wanted to share some interesting ideas Stuart showcased to me, in particular the concept of “smart call”.

What is a smart call? A smart call is basically a call where both caller and called party “agree” about the call itself. How many times you are bothered by others who try to reach you on the phone while you are busy? Sometimes those calls could be important but you can’t know unless you take that call, loosing precious time.

A smart call is basically a call where you receive a “message” in advance of the call. Examples of content of this message could be the following:

Example1

Caller: John

Reason: That client signed the deal

Availability: now (CLICK HERE) or in 30 Minutes (CLICK THERE)

Example2

Caller: Girlfriend

Reason: I miss you

Availability: now (CLICK HERE)

Example3

Caller: Boss

Reason: Fired

Availability: now (CLICK HERE) next year (CLICK HERE)

Those above are just some examples and could be either SMS, IMs, Twitter messages or… name one! If you click the correspondent link, a call will be made/scheduled and the system will, for example, call both people and connect the call. You can also have a dial-in number that is automatically called when you click there, according to the device you chose to receive/make calls. From the caller perspective, there could be many different ways to “generate” a smart call, IM, SMS, Twitter… again different methods.

Is it smart? Oh yes, it is. Think of how much time you might save and how you can improve your productivity. Moreover, the recipients of those messages can be more than one so that a conference call is setup. Stuart & David’s service does this already, through Twitter, but this way to look at Phweet make it clear that there are tons of potential applications that could be built on top of it.

In conclusion, I strongly believe this concept would lead to a wide number of value added applications which bring telephony, web, unified messaging together, letting you improve your productivity and make a better usage of your time.

Ops, I must go, a smart call is waiting for me…

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Tagged as: David Beckemeyer, luca filigheddu, Mobile, phweet, smart calls, stuart henshall, Telecommunications, Twitter