Many of you have been asking us about our latest venture, and we’ve been pretty quiet about it so far, but we’re happy to share a bit more.
In a nutshell, we’re trying to re-invent the phone.
After working for years on social and identity issues at Yahoo! (Greg) and mobile experiences at Nokia and elsewhere (Will), we were struck by the idea that traditional telephony is broken, and the phone network has been left behind in the wave of social and mobile innovation that is happening today.
In looking for a big, meaningful challenge to tackle, we were inspired by this one and so created Ad Hoc Labs.
Our first product, Burner, will release today for iOS. Burner allows you to create temporary, disposable phone numbers that you can use for anything from dating and Craigslist to sharing on social networks.
We’ve been playing with it for a little while, and we’re pretty excited about it, so we hope you’ll find a few minutes to check it out, play with it, and tell us what you think. Better yet, share some fun stories about how you use it.
But Burner is only part of our vision to build an identity layer for the phone.
In a world where more and more people using their mobile phones exclusively, we’re really bothered by the fact that when you give out a phone number, the person you give it to can reach you any time, day or night, forever – that there’s no way to “unfriend” someone in your address book. Ever.
At the same time, your phone knows a ton about you – your location, your calendar, and even your friends. But none that incredible information can be used to help you stay connected by phone to the people you’re closest to, and with whom you’d happily share some of that information.
We often find ourselves saying that the phone network is a dumb network in a smart-network world. Many have said, in fact, that the phone app is the worst app on the iPhone. We find this unacceptable, we think it could be so much better, and we’re here to change it.
Starting with Burner, which is like a wallet full of temporary identities for social and transactional connections. And we have much more in store.
Thank you, friends, for all of your support over the months we’ve been developing this. Once again, we can’t wait to hear what you think of Burner. We also hope you’ll join in the conversation about it by following us on Twitter and/or Facebook.
Yours,
Greg, Will, and the Ad Hoc Labs team