ThinkingPhones Buys Contactive to convey better Caller identity to business

Michael Davidson

It looks like a long time when you consider that Caller id—that humble but useful development to previous-college landline telephones—felt excessive-tech and slicing-part. but ThinkingPhones, a Cambridge, MA-based totally communications tool company, thinks Caller id has a future, and that new technology can provide it new lifestyles. That’s why the company simply offered Contactive, a New York city-based big information startup, for an undisclosed worth. the businesses introduced the deal Wednesday.

ThinkingPhones makes tool that manages cellphone calls, video conferences, textual content messages, and collaboration apps via a cloud-based platform that’s optimized for cellphones. It also has different capabilities, like linking to industry apps and tracking how fast workers return calls and the way much time they spend speaking with customers.

Co-founder and CEO Steve Kokinos stated his company desires to be the one corporations turn to when they replace growing older communications techniques which might be based around phones on staff’ desks with new systems that contain staff’ smartphones and mobile devices. He believes Contactive will give ThinkingPhones an area.

Contactive has created two apps it calls “Caller id on steroids”: Contactive’s namesake consumer app for Android users, which the company says has greater than 1 million users, and Klink, the more powerful enterprise model of that app.

Contactive says its apps can establish greater than 600 million callers by means of automatically doing searches for phone numbers and names on Google, in public directories, and in social networks. After scouring the web, it compiles the ideas and provides it to users sooner than they solution calls.

the key to Contactive isn’t just selecting callers, Kokinos mentioned, however that it quick offers vital details about callers, like their LinkedIn profiles, contemporary tweets, links to previous electronic mail exchanges, or information from Salesforce. Klink can go a number of steps farther by using citing present sales date, updating contact information, and logging calls.

So the brand new capabilities go a long way beyond announcing who’s on the road.

“It’s actually about bringing context to communications, and the concept that when any individual calls you, it’s now not as regards to the phone quantity and if it’s for your contacts or no longer, it’s about being able to pull from all forms of knowledge sources throughout the cloud ecosystem,” Kokinos said. “it will strengthen the experience of end users through helping them take into account what’s going on round them.”

In December, ThinkingPhones stated it raised a $ fifty six million sequence D spherical. Kokinos stated that money might be used to pay for growth efforts as the company adds to sales and advertising and analysis and development efforts.

acquiring Klink was an opportunistic transfer that wasn’t associated to the round, Kokinos stated.

“We see this as actually complementary to our vision, an enhancement to the work we’ve already been doing,” Kokinos mentioned. “i feel their approach is indubitably distinctive and one thing we notion was once compelling.”

All told, ThinkingPhones has raised $ 89 million considering the fact that its founding in 2006. It employs about 250 individuals and desires to double by way of the end of the year.

the marketplace for unified communications services and products may be tens of billions per year, and it’s a container Kokinos thinks is prepared for the taking. He factors out best 5 % of firms greater than 250 staff have shifted to cloud-based communications techniques. the most important avid gamers within the sector are incumbents like Cisco and Avaya, which Kokinos believes are wedded to hardware-primarily based methods which might be falling at the back of what the cloud can offer.

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