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Show HN: Contactive API – Turn telephone numbers into full profiles

developer.contactive.com

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Re: Show HN: Contactive API – Turn telephone numbers into full profiles

#31

Post by joshfraser »

Ecio78 wrote: post #19
whoisjuan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well. We have a much more bigger phone number database and provide very compelling profiles associated to each phone number. Full Contact doesn't focus on phone numbers. We do. As a matter of fact, our API powers our core services like our Contactive Caller ID app which has more than 1 million downloads in the Google Play Store with a consistent 4-5 star rating.

Direct question: are you using the app to collect info about the users to you can enhance your database also based on that data?

I'd be interested in knowing the answer to this too.

Re: Show HN: Contactive API – Turn telephone numbers into full profiles

#32

Post by uqimu »

ponyous wrote: post #27
lsanza wrote: post #23

This looks interesting to integrate with sales apps. What are the demographics of the 600M phone numbers? Mostly US? Percentage of business/residential?

As stated on webpage: "Contactive provides enhanced information for 86% of incoming calls in the U.S., and for more than 50% globally, adding rich context with photos, names, companies, addresses, and more."

Exactly! These numbers represent the percentage of API calls that we resolve depending on the numbers' country. That is, we are likely to add information to a phone number if the phone number is from the US, but we also do quite well globally.

Re: Show HN: Contactive API – Turn telephone numbers into full profiles

#33

Post by sologoub »

codeoclock wrote: post #11

This + twilio = user identification. Looks like I'm gonna have to be more careful with my phone number...

This is already a business reality for most savvy organizations. Example, ordered pizza on saturday. Sunday, call another branch of the same pizza shop and the person answering the phone greets me by name before I even have a chance to say hello...

I was creeped out for a second, but then proceeded to order more pizza.

Re: Show HN: Contactive API – Turn telephone numbers into full profiles

#34

Post by julman99 »

tomadams wrote: post #28

We would like to add this feature to our app. How often do you guys refresh your data?

We have partnerships with other data companies and we also use the social network APIs.

Everything is stored in a graph and to make the connections between phone, emails and identities we've created algorithms to compare contact information. For this we use signals like name similarity, location, friends in common and many others.

All of this is indexed in realtime and when you do a query to our API you get the most up-to-date data.

Re: Show HN: Contactive API – Turn telephone numbers into full profiles

#35

Post by julman99 »

ch4s3 wrote: post #4

This seems incredibly invasive. Can anyone imagine something positive and constructive this could be used for? Also what does "big data logic" mean?

The term "big data" stands for the nature of the data Contactive stores, which comes many sources. Most of this data is unstructured and unorganized, and we are able to structure and index it.

Every time we get new data, we have to compare it with the existing set. This is done in realtime..

So, the fact we have 600+ million identities ready to be queried is the result of having a much bigger dataset were all the non-matched-yet data is stored.

Re: Show HN: Contactive API – Turn telephone numbers into full profiles

#38

Post by bnejad »

sologoub wrote: post #33
codeoclock wrote: post #11

This + twilio = user identification. Looks like I'm gonna have to be more careful with my phone number...

This is already a business reality for most savvy organizations. Example, ordered pizza on saturday. Sunday, call another branch of the same pizza shop and the person answering the phone greets me by name before I even have a chance to say hello... I was creeped out for a second, but then proceeded to order more pizza.

There's nothing weird going on there.. They took down your name when you called and they simply log you in their system with the phone # you called in with, your name, and likely your address if you got it delivered.

Re: Show HN: Contactive API – Turn telephone numbers into full profiles

#39

Post by julman99 »

67726e wrote: post #3

Seems like Full Contact? http://www.fullcontact.com/

These are some difference with Full Contact:

- All Contactive API accesses are real time. If we have the data, we will return it right away, if we don't, we will try to find it as soon as we can and return it on the same API request. Full Contact uses the callback pattern, where they notify when they are able or not to resolve the information on a separate call (if they dont have it at the moment of query).

- Contactive not only gives you social network identities, it also gives you aggregated and prioritized data, like the job history of someone, or the list of pictures. This data is returned in the best possible way to be displayed. This saves time from developers because they do not have to make any effort prioritizing each field of the many sources we return.

- Contactive also gives you HTML rendering of a contact, allowing you as a developer to embed it on a iframe. This allows you to integrate it in a web app in a matter of minutes.

Re: Show HN: Contactive API – Turn telephone numbers into full profiles

#40

Post by uqimu »

hackmorris wrote: post #36

This looks like a ripoff of EveryoneAPI.com

We solve a similar problem but our approaches are different. For example, we don't charge for every bit of information and we integrate with social networks to provide a more complete version of the profile, including job position and education.
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