An Idea Born On Twitter

Its been a while since I last blogged. Unfortunately like everyone else I too caught the Twitter bug. After spending a month on it I realised what a fool I had been but at the same time I was happy to know that I was just one among the millions. We talk of distractions & waste of time, spending hours on twitter & Facebook is just that. Now that Im out of it, it back to blogging & reading with gusto. Its been a while since I blogged for something other than contests too! I don’t regret that coz there’s a brand new speaker set courtesy those contests in my bedroom.

But there is one thing that did come out of all that time on twitter though. So many useless contests aimed at making you spend hours on your desktop of phone, making you check every hour or so. The one which caught my eye was the one about “My dream App”. Though I didn’t enter the contest, I did get me thinking & reminded me of an idea I had about 3 years back.

Im no software engineer, not even close to it. But I do love getting into the technical aspects of it all or atleast read about it. And Im very much into Apps. One of the apps which I think would work is what I call the CAMFIND. This idea came to me back when Facebook had started “facetags”. Face tags have well & truly been abolished  but I think that this App can still be possible if some software techs take it up :-D

My concept of Camfind is simple. Everyone is into social networking these days. Earlier believed to be only for youngsters, now even the older generation is taking a liking to it. And why? Coz everyone wants to know someone new, keep in touch with them. Everyone looks up someone they don’t know on Facebook. Common friends, email search, name search, college search… You can search based on every possible field. So this is where this app was born.

Now lets assume you are at the launch of a new car alone, you see someone who for some reason has caught your eye. But you have no idea who the person is. You’re sure your never gonna find that person ever again. Then what if you take out your phone, go to the app & slowly focus the camera on the person & it instantly takes you to the persons Facebook or Picasa profile or atleast gives you his/her name! I know this is a huge breach of privacy but then if apps like True caller can do it, then why cant this one too. Since facetags are no longer in use, the CAMFIND App can set up its own facetags & the users who download it can choose whether or not they want to be tagged to be used with the app so the issue of privacy also gets solved. As it is, its supposed to just display the name of facebook profile so I don’t think anyone would have issues with it. Sometimes at a gathering you see someone who looks very familiar but you just cant place him/her, App can solve your dilemma immediately. I dont know how practical this App is but then I dont have to break my head over it coz Im not the one making it. So now if only one of those software geeks reads this & takes it up seriously & also pays me royalties when the app is out…..

My Apps - TRUE CALLER

One of my favourite games on my Samsung Galaxy ace is Basketball. A real simple game which very light weight for my phone which obviously cant handle big games. But this isn’t about the game. I mention this because everytime I played the game, at the bottom of the screen around the corner of my eye I used to see a tiny advertisement for “TRUE CALLER”. Somehow I never paid attention to it coz come on, lets be honest, one never bothers about the ads while playing a game! Anyways it was only after I was told about the app by someone else did I try it.

They say android has millions of apps, but lets face it, most of them are crap. Only a few of those many are good & still fewer being excellent. So where does True Caller stand? To think that one can actually have a caller ID on his/her cellphone which will detect ANY unknown call is definitely far fetched. But here is an app that comes as close to it as possible. It actually does what it says!  1^st things 1^st. It’s a light weight app & hence my Galaxy Ace(which is halfway between a horse & a turtle) can handle it with ease. After you search & download it from Google Play, the final installed version looks like this.



Once you’ve done so, Ill bet you that you’ll spend atleast the next one hour trying out all unknown numbers just to know if the app works & also to know who your stalkers are & trust me when the app gets it right its loads of fun. . And boy its simple!! Open the app & just enter the number that you want to know in the search bar. It searches for about 10 seconds & gives you your result, yes in 10 seconds! The result can obviously be either the name or the “no matches found”. Though there will be a large number of negative results, its surprising how often it gets the number right. Considering the fact that its still in its early days with constant updating going on, the search results can only get better. Whats more is that it even has a live search i.e it detects the number when there’s an incoming call which is fabulous & does not interfere with the built in phone settings.

They also have an option of name search. Now I don’t really know how that is going to work coz its still not been enabled but sounds cool. Imagine typing in a name & getting their phone number! Plus a few other goodies like the usual facebook connect(which almost every app, every website has these days) & also a CALL FILTER which allows you to block those unwanted calls. All this for free with no irritating ads in between(Ironic coz I saw this app as an ad on the other app hehe) Now isn’t this a  power packed app & a perfect example of good things coming in small packages!