Phonebooks are stuck in the stone age, this app wants to take them into the future

Photo credit: Wang Wong.

Phones have changed fast, but phonebooks have more or less remained the same. That’s a point of contention for the founder of InTouch, Sarang Lakare.

“Phonebooks today are dumb,” he says. “We’re still writing down numbers the way we did in diaries years ago. There’s been barely any innovation.”

InTouch is an app that lets users organize their phonebook, backup data, and sync contact information across devices.

It’s releasing a share-with-friends feature today that lets users create lists of contacts to share with their friends. The new feature comes hand-in-hand with another shiny announcement: the app has raised its first round of money from Blume Ventures.

“The ability to share and add relevant network seamlessly in a mobile centric era is what InTouch will solve,” managing partner of Blume Ventures Karthik Reddy says. “The hole left by LinkedIn is ours to fill.”

People are ready for better phonebooks

Photo credit: Michael Mandiberg.

InTouch has a few interesting use cases that Sarang mentions.

When he was returning to India from the United States, he realized that the contact information of his family and friends was really disorganized. “That’s where the seed was planted,” he says. “I knew these people well, and they would have given me their updated numbers for sure.”

“That’s where the seed for innovating the phonebook was planted,” he adds.

Other use cases include a wife having trouble getting phone numbers from her husband serving offshore in the Navy and a dead smartphone battery at the end of a cab ride – “It would have been really handy then if I could access my contacts on my phone!” Sarang says.

The app has gained most of its popularity in mobile-first countries, but Sarang explains that its customer base is scattered across the globe. “We don’t have a single country where downloads are concentrated,” he says. “There’s India, the US, the UK, South Africa, Nigeria – they’re all in our top ten.”

InTouch is mostly used by professionals and those between the ages of 25 and 35. Sarang says that it’s rated over 4.4 stars on the app store, and is available on all major smartphone platforms, from Windows to Blackberry to iOS to Android.

Potential aplenty