Disqus - Latest Comments for JasonDevitt

Re: Developer Claims Google Forced It to Drop Crowdsourced Caller ID From Android App

Jason Devitt — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 21:02:00 -0000

KenEsq,

(1) Crowd-sourced Caller ID was the first and only feature of Mr. Number when it launched in 2010, so I am not sure what you mean by saying the app was better before it.
(2) We did offer the choice of paying for Caller ID instead of sharing your data.
(3) Many apps, including Google's, ask you to upload all of your contacts, and I do not know of any that request permission from your contacts. (Sending an unsolicited message directly to your contacts is against the law.)
(4) The link to manage your Caller ID is on the top bar of our home page. There is no search box on our home page.

Re: Developer Claims Google Forced It to Drop Crowdsourced Caller ID From Android App

Jason Devitt — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 18:54:22 -0000

Myles, your phone number was never publicly available through Mr. Number and you never had to download our app to delete it from our system (assuming that we had it). The only time that we connected your name to your phone number was when you called or texted one of our users on their mobile phone.

Re: New update to Mr. Number gives you even more control

Jason Devitt — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 01:01:44 -0000

Right now this isn't possible, but if we can do so in a future version of Android we will.

Re: New update to Mr. Number gives you even more control

Jason Devitt — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:55:44 -0000

Please send a note to support@mrnumber.com so we can try to help.

Re: New update to Mr. Number gives you even more control

Jason Devitt — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:55:00 -0000

We'd love to! Unfortunately none of this is possible on the iPhone. Apple does not allow call blocking or true caller ID.

Re: New update to Mr. Number gives you even more control

Jason Devitt — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:53:45 -0000

Mr. Number does not take over your texting and calling - you decide whether you want to use it that way. If you're getting duplicate notifications for text messages, we're sorry, that was a bug that we fixed earlier this week.

Re: PrivacyStar Blocks Unwanted Callers on Android 2.3.3

Jason Devitt — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 17:09:44 -0000

As of today, Mr. Number is also working on Android 2.3.3. The call and text blocking features are free and available in all countries. Let me know if you want more info.

Re: You Got To Be In It To Win It

Jason Devitt — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 15:38:47 -0000

Fred, you and some other VCs have made the case for standard docs in seed and Series A financings. Isn't there an even stronger argument to be made for standardized option agreements?

In a financing, both sides typically have legal representation. (Woe unto the founders if they think their company's lawyers are their personal lawyers, but that's another issue.) In a board-executive negotiation, both sides should have counsel.

But a junior employee shouldn't have to hire an attorney to review their agreement, and almost certainly couldn't afford one who knew what he was doing. It's very one-sided.

Option agreements differ in vesting terms, repurchase rights, and what happens in the event of an acquisition or IPO. Worst of all, a lot of companies refuse to tell employees how many shares are outstanding (and therefore what percentage of the company their options represent) which makes it impossible to weigh the grant against the salary you might get at a larger company.

With no way to gauge their value, a lot of engineers treat options like a lottery ticket and demand the same salary they'd get at Microsoft - especially if they've been burnt before. For startups and their investors, this defeats the purpose of options.

Get together with some other VCs. Create a standard form option agreement. Publish it on the web with detailed commentary. Use it for all your portfolio companies. Companies can depart from that, but new hires will be able to hone in on the non-standard language and request an explanation.

Self-regulation. It's better than (1) government regulation, (2) seeing your agreements tossed out in court as contracts of adhesion, or (3) employees valuing option grants at zero.

Re: Service Outage

Jason Devitt — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 17:21:26 -0000

Kevin, the ringer problem was a bug on our side and we fixed it last night. But because of the Amazon outage the app was not working at all for new users this morning, so we took it out of the Market. We hope to be back soon.

Re: Service Outage

Jason Devitt — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:01:38 -0000

Yes, we've removed the new version from sale temporarily. If we can't guarantee a good experience for first-time users, there's no point.

Re: Marketing

Jason Devitt — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 11:53:27 -0000

Fred, most of the companies in your portfolio were started by great, instinctive marketers who surrounded themselves with great engineers.

Jason

Re: Caller ID and Call Blocking – App Powers Combine

Jason Devitt — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:14:47 -0000

Bob, we don't need you to choose a password until you need to change something on your account. That's why you were able to use the service without it.

Mark is asking for your phone number so that he can *call* you and confirm your request. Again, it's so rare for us to encounter someone who doesn't have text messaging that we may as well call you in person.

If you send new emails to support@mrnumber.com, you will get an auto-response. 90% of customer support queries are handled by that email. If you reply to the auto-response, you should not get another one, unless your email client is stripping the headers or the subject line.

Thanks for your patience.

Re: Caller ID and Call Blocking – App Powers Combine

Jason Devitt — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 14:47:58 -0000

Sorry about that Bob. Very, very, very few people have turned off text messaging entirely, but we may add a voice alternative to text messaging for confirming your password.

Re: Porting A Number To Google Voice

Jason Devitt — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:09:19 -0000

You can already do that by porting your number to phone.com or Toktumi. There aren't any technical barriers, but there is some admin overhead, and that's what stopping Google from offering the service. If Google can't automate X, they don't do X.

My point is that I don't think we should overhaul the telco infrastructure for the sake of porting phone numbers to Google Voice. There are more important things to worry about, and since Google Voice is itself a hack, it would be bad policy.

(And I am very well thank you, we should catch up some time.)

Re: Porting A Number To Google Voice

Jason Devitt — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 12:05:26 -0000

When you port your number from Verizon to AT&T, you cancel your Verizon service. When you port a number from Verizon to Google Voice, you need to keep your Verizon service and get a new phone number from them to forward your Google Voice calls to. In the limit, we'd need to give everyone in the country two phone numbers so that they could hand out one. It's a nice hack, but it doesn't scale, we shouldn't expect carriers to bear the expense of making it easy, and we shouldn't ask regulators to write a hack into law.

The real solution is to move away from phone numbers altogether. Phone numbers should be like IP addresses; I don't know yours and you probably don't know it either. You should have an easy to remember ID that resolves to a phone number which no-one ever needs to know. The tech and standards already exist: SIP, ENUM etc. But the switching costs would be enormous, because so many systems and behaviors are tied to phone numbers. When everyone in the world has a smartphone ...

Re: New version of Mr. Number for BlackBerry

Jason Devitt — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 22:13:36 -0000

Frances,

Just download the Mr. Number app for your new phone, and login with
your old phone number and Skydeck password. You will be prompted to
migrate your account to Mr. Number - say yes - and then you can
restore your contacts to your new phone.

If you don't have a Skydeck password or you can't remember what it is,
just choose the Forgot password link from the first page of the Mr.
Number app. For your own security, we need to send your password to
your old phone number, so if you've changed your number you need to
have access to your old phone.

Re: Steve Jobs single-handedly restructured the mobile industry

Jason Devitt — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 22:05:08 -0000

It's true that the industry is going through a massive re-alignment. But there's still a role for biz dev and sales.

As developers, we don't have enough marketing tools in our kit yet. The app stores are immature, mobile advertising is difficult to track, it's hard to close a viral loop when your user has a Droid and their friends have iPhones and BlackBerries etc. etc. For most developers, no amount of advertising or buzz can compare with an OEM or carrier pre-load. I just saw that Sprint has pre-loaded Qik on the HTC Evo; that's huge for them. More generally, who decides what apps are 'featured' in the Android Market? Hint: it's not an algorithm.

It's possible that this will all go the way of the web. It's also possible that we've replaced incompetent dictators with competent dictators. Instead of sending biz dev to Newark, Atlanta, Kansas City, and Seattle, we'll send them to Cupertino, Mountain View, and Waterloo instead.

Re: VentureBeat writes about Mr. Number

Jason Devitt — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:04:52 -0000

We'd love to help, but you didn't leave a valid email address or enough information to go on. Please write to support@mrnumber.com.

Re: Welcome to Mr. Number

Jason Devitt — Sun, 30 May 2010 20:31:39 -0000

Sebastian, Mr. Number is only available in the US for now. Subscribe to the blog and you'll be one of the first to know when we start expanding internationally.

Re: The Quandry

Jason Devitt — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:04:46 -0000

Fred, you want a multi-purpose device that is also optimal for a single purpose. There are some things you just can't have :)

For a multi-purpose device, the best possible UI is a blank slate. Phones like that are now (or soon will be) good enough to satisfy 80%-90% of the people who currently own a dedicated GPS unit, handheld-gaming device, e-book, music player, or email device.

But that still leaves 10%-20% of people in each category who need a dedicated device. You may be in that 20% for email; I am for e-books; a DJ might be for music players.

Re: Skydeck for iPhone

Jason Devitt — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 21:56:38 -0000

We're still investigating this. This seems to affect people who use ActiveSync (Exchange Server or Google) as well as Skydeck. We're sorry we didn't catch this earlier and we're working on a fix, but since Apple requires several weeks to approve any updates we can't push something out overnight the way we can with Android and BlackBerry.

Re: Skydeck for iPhone

Jason Devitt — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:29:42 -0000

James, our support team will contact you so that we can figure this out.

Re: Skydeck for iPhone

Jason Devitt — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:25:34 -0000

Joe, you should be able to find Skydeck in the Android Market on your Droid right now. We'll write more about that tomorrow.

Re: The Unlocked Phone Movement Gets A Big Boost

Jason Devitt — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 13:54:48 -0000

In other countries, when you bring your own phone to the network the operator will give you a cheaper monthly plan. Until recently, no US operator offered this deal. If you brought an unlocked phone to their network, you were effectively paying for two phones - the one you bought yourself and the free one they built into the cost of your plan whether you wanted it or not.

In October T-Mobile became the first carrier to offer a discount for bringing your own phone. On their high-end plan, you'll save $480 over two years if you bring your own phone - enough to buy a Google phone. I wrote about it here: http://bit.ly/tmobile_even_...

That said, you've built your consumer portfolio on the premise that "free" is an irresistible price point. The same applies to cell phones.

Re: Blackberry apps

Jason Devitt — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 15:01:32 -0000

Not sure what you mean by "each time the mobile app makes a call to a new api, you get the damn popups." I've never seen that myself.

If you are talking about one-time requests on install, then yes on both BB and Android phones you often have to give an app permissions. You get similar popups on the iPhone when an app wants access to your location or wants to send you push notifications. If you see more requests on BB/Android, it's because there are more things that app developers can do - things that we cannot do on the iPhone *with or without* your permission.