
Show HN: Contactive API – Turn telephone numbers into full profiles - whoisjuan
http://developer.contactive.com/?hackernews
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ch4s3
This seems incredibly invasive. Can anyone imagine something positive and
constructive this could be used for?

Also what does "big data logic" mean?

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whoisjuan
Hi. Thanks for the comment. We only use data that is publicly available
(LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Yelp (for businesses), etc. Regarding the "big
data" logic we use a lot of complex algorithms to provide accurate resolution
and to be able to create compelling profiles. We consider ourselves as a "big
data" solutions because of the principles we use to aggregate this data.

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ch4s3
Just because a phone number is publically available doesn't mean that the
owner of that number wants all of their public information aggregated for an
unknown purpose, which looks to be a pipeline for sales lead generation.

What use case is your product addressing?

And I'm sorry, but 600 million unique data entries isn't "big data" that would
fit into a single Excel 2013 worksheet if you used multiple columns (570 ish
columns) but still 1 worksheet.

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julman99
The 600+ million records are not just unique records since phone numbers are
not necessarily primary keys. One of the challenges of Contactive is about
indexing and building relationships between phone numbers, emails and social
identities. Every time we collect new data, it is stored into the directory
and indexed in realtime.

It is also important to know that we only index public data and also we
provide an opt-out option if someone wants to be unlisted.

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JoshTriplett
What's the provenance of this information?

Where's the opt-out, both for individuals with individual phone numbers, and
for businesses who own large blocks of numbers?

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whoisjuan
We get all the information from public sources: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter,
Yelp, Google Places, AngelList, etc.

You can always mail us to contact@contactive.com for any privacy concern. We
would remove any phone number upon request.

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ompemi
Do you plan to be able to input 3rd party private information? I would like to
import my 3rd party phone numbers database and related information, being only
accessible for my API account. This could lead to interesting integrations
with sales databases.

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whoisjuan
Yes! This is in the horizon of the product and it would be more likely to be
the following step after we get out of beta.

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techaddict009
Are you guys using Truecaller data?

How much out of 600M are Indian Contacts?

Can we have countries vise count of Data you own?

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ral1331
Hi, thanks for the question. We don't use any Truecaller data. As a general
break down by country, 51% of our resolved calls are from the United States,
4% from India, 9% from Spain, 9% from Singapore, and fairly dispersed after
that.

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67726e
Seems like Full Contact?
[http://www.fullcontact.com/](http://www.fullcontact.com/)

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whoisjuan
Yes. The difference is that our core data is based on phone numbers. Instead
of an email address you can query a phone number and retrieve a profile
associated to that phone number. Imagine "Full Contact" for phone numbers.

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sunsu
FullContact also offers searching by Phone Number. Its not very good though.
How is your's better?

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whoisjuan
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.

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Ecio78
Direct question: are you using the app to collect info about the users to you
can enhance your database also based on that data?

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julman99
We use the app for machine learning purposes. When you get a call that cannot
be identified, we ask the user to input the name of the caller.

Additionally, if we identify a call, but the resolution has low confidence,
the user will be prompted to vote it up or down. This feeds directly into our
identity graph, recalculating in realtime the connections between identities
and contact information.

We also use the client app to enhance the existing connections in our identity
graph. Each edge in our graph has a confidence level, and by using the data
available to the app we adjust and recalculate the confidence levels of our
directory in real-time. We never publish data points like photos, notes, etc.
from the address book of our users.

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hackmorris
So the answer is yes??

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tomjen3
Who would want to use this, other than inbound sales teams? Customer support
already has it, and it is not that useful to go from phone number to profile
as it is to go the other way.

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

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ponyous
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."

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uqimu
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.

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nnikova
Bingo! This is precisely what I was looking for. With the number of calls I
receive, I need to figure out which ones I can safely ignore. Contactive
rocks.

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DmitryShamak
What is the price of this after 1000 queries? What if the person who calls
doesn't want to show his profile to man that he call to?

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whoisjuan
This is the beta of our API and we have pricing plan with SKU's upon request.
We first want to get data on what a typical usage of the API looks like.

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

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whoisjuan
We know there may be some privacy concerns regarding the use of our data but
we don't allow anyone to systematically query our API to build phone number
lists (We just allow 180 requests per min) We are very strict in the way
people use our API. That's the reason we don't have an open registration
process.

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hackmorris
Yikes 180/m may seem like a lot ... but in the world of data that is a very
small amount of usage. Your site says "big data" so this limitation begs the
question -- Are you big data (enterprise) or not?

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

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julman99
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.

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hackmorris
This looks like a ripoff of EveryoneAPI.com

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uqimu
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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cbrunner
Hi Chris Brunner here, from EveryoneAPI.com. I agree that this is _not_ a
ripoff of our product. As uqimu stated, we're solving the same problem, but we
use very different sources. While social is a component that we utilize, it is
not our primary source. hackmorris is correct that we'll be adding more
datapoints from social shortly, and uqimu is correct that we don't offer all
of it today.

I look forward to checking out the Contactive API, and perhaps even having a
discussion with them to see if there is an opportunity for us to work
together.

In the meantime, since our product was mentioned here, I'd be happy to field
any questions.

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spopova
Wow, this is super cool!

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whoisjuan
Thanks!

