We had a meeting today where we verbalized what we’ve already realized. We aren’t about anonymous phone services so much as liberating people’s phone behavior. As characterized by Tim in a meeting today anonymous calling gives us the mental picture of an old white van with shades in the windows. That’s not us at all. We have a bigger solution, a bigger vision. Our vision is to liberate people’s communications behavior, allowing them to port their online communications behavior to their phone.
Consumers have come to adopt online communications. This is where we can police inbound communication, and protect ourselves or hide behind outbound communication. Or said differently, this is where we can finally express ourselves in new ways, proliferating ourselves on new channels. How many times have you written something in an e-mail, that you’d never say in person? Lots. But when doing so you weren’t necessarily thinking “I’m anonymous so I’ll say this or that.” It was more like “I can do this so I will.”
So as consumers we’re hip to this mode of communication online, yet there’s this other communication we’ve had for a hundred years (the phone), that hasn’t caught onto these web modalities. That’s where jangl comes in. This is where the cultural relevance comes into play.
Mobile phones specifically allow us to talk and text, but with some web enabled stuff and some voice over IP stuff behind the scenes, we get to a point where for the first time we can apply the web mode to the phone. So yes...we’re giving people the ability to police inbound communication, and protect themselves during outbound communication. Said more accurately, we’re giving people the ability to act on phones the way they’ve come to act online. So it’s not about “disposable, anonymous phone numbers”, it’s about liberating an old school habit!
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