Drumbi: rethinking the dialer
The computing power of smart phones today is robust, and entrepreneurs have created thousands of applications that leverage the capabilities of these machines. Surprisingly, however, one of the primary functions of a smart phone—initiating and receiving actual phone calls—has received relatively little attention. A company called Drumbi is filling this void. "Your frustration when your phone rings is that if you're lucky you know who's calling you," explains Shervin Talieh, Co-founder and CEO of Drumbi. "What you don't know is why they're calling, what they want to talk about, if it's urgent or where they are...[Additionally,] the zero through nine convention for a dial pad has many limitations for the end user. The first is that it's static—it's just staring at you. It doesn't tell you, for example, what the other person wants to talk about when your phone is about to ring. The dialer also requires you to do a bunch of data entry, which is prone to having errors and prone to other forms of downstream issues as well. Lastly, the issue with the dialer is, unlike everything else that's on your smart phone, it's not smart. It's not integrated with your social graph...When you're having a phone call with someone, there's absolutely no way of connecting that to Facebook, or Twitter, or Google+ or anything else." When initiating a conversation using Drumbi, you are able indicate the purpose of the call via a short, Twitter-like description, set a level of urgency to the call <b>...</b>
