iConverged

I noticed quite a flutter on several blogs and news sites on a new service from Trapcall that allows you to “see” Caller ID even if the caller blocks the caller ID.

A layman description: Jack is an agressive sales person who loves calling his prospective customer Bob with his caller ID blocked, so that Bob will be forced to pick up the phone and have a chat with Jack.  This is a good ploy, because Bob may otherwise ignore the call if he recognizes Jack’s number. (There are of course more serious situations like domestic abuse etc. reported on other sites)

So what does Bob do ? Well, Bob sets ‘Call Forwarding on No Answer’ and/or ‘Call Forward Busy’ etc. on his phone to point to a Trapcall 1-800 number. That’s all.

So what happens ? Jack calls Bob. Bob gets an incoming call without an ID. He ignores it. This makes the call route to Trapcall’s 1-800 # which does  its ‘Voodoo’ and routes the call back to Bob, who gets an incoming call again,  but this time with Bob’s caller ID !! So he can now really ignore it.

How does this work ?

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I’ve always believed the concept of location is important to an application, but it does not really define an application. Continuing that line of thought, I think many companies who join the ‘LBS is a killer Application’ idealogy have it completely wrong.

Location is NOT going to be successful as an Application. It is going to be super successful as a tool. Let me justify my stand.

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