Caller ID App TrueCaller Nears Half a Million Users in India [INTERVIEW]

Ever since I’ve heard of it, TrueCaller has been a must-have phone app for me. It not only acts as a global caller ID, but also helps me block spam calls from strangers and tele-marketers. It has been only two years since its first release, but TrueCaller serves users in countries from all over the world and has a comprehensive crowd-sourced address book with millions of contacts in it. The TrueCaller team shared some interesting statistics with Penn-Olson:

• Users in India: 470,000
• Users in Asia: 665,000
• Users around the world: 1,600,000
• Users on Symbian: approx 900,000
• Users on Android: 300,000
• Users on iOS: 300,000
• Users on Windows: 100,000
• Spam numbers reported numbers in India: 335,000
• New spam numbers reported every day in India: 1,600
• Spam numbers blocked using TrueCaller every day in India: 11,000
• Searches in India per day: 244,000
• Searches in Asia per day: 447,000

To get more background on these numbers, we got in touch with the founders, Nami Zarringhalam and Alan Mamedi.

Why and when was TrueCaller founded? What inspired you to create it?

TrueCaller was founded in July 2009 by Alan Mamedi and myself, Nami Zarringhalam. The reason we created it was because we needed the service ourselves and we had some basic development knowledge. After having developed a first version we uploaded it to a popular developer forum for others to use as well. Within the first few days we already had 10,000 installs. That’s when we decided we wanted to pursue this further.

Can you describe the main features of TrueCaller?

TrueCaller is an app that aims to give as much information as possible about the people you communicate with. So if there is a unkown number calling you, we’ll try to find the name of that person or company and even if it is a spam caller so that we can warn you about it. In addition, if your friend or colleague calls you, we’ll try to give you as much information as possible from your social networks such as Facebook or Linkedin, so that you are always up-to-date with what’s going on with the people you care for and really communicate with.

How does TrueCaller work on a technical level?

TrueCaller connects to white and yellow pages all over the world which means if there is public data available in your country, we’ll try to access it and share that data with you. However in most countries of the world, this data isn’t publicly available and it is definitely not free. So in order to access and distribute this data we decided to crowd-source the information. Therefore when you start TrueCaller you will get the possibility to share your phone book, and in return you will get access to search other users’ shared phonebooks. But in order to protect our users and their data we have also made it so that you can only search the crowd-sourced data by already having the number and then getting access to the name. This means the phone number is effectively turned into the key needed to open the vault for information associated to that number.