Enhancing Jaiku Mobile with call filtering.
Or: Creating a nice interface for programmable call filtering.
EMT, an Estonian mobile operator, provides a very interesting service named call filtering what essentially is a user-programmable call router for your GSM number. It allows you to have whitelists and blacklists of phone numbers you want to receive or drop or forward to another number – without a ‘beep’ on your phone.
Traditionally you could either switch off your phone (and lose all calls), forward calls to voicemail or another person (and lose all calls but still get SMS messages), keep your phone in silent mode if you do not want to be disturbed but would still want to see who calls you (and possibly answer some calls) or just press the red button to get rid of annoying callers.
Jaiku is all about enhancing your mobile experience. Rich presence and status information on your mobile device – what we are all used to from IM networks – is here to stay. But IM clients/networks have also something I would call ‘rich contact and privacy management’. Take a look at Skype privacy settings or think about the last time you blocked an annoying user on some IM network.
Now.. Just as Jaiku Mobile integrates with your address book and allows to share your status and location with folks in your address book – wouldn’t it be nice if selecting ‘block this person’ in your rich address book would actually propagate the blocking action down to the GSM network level and answer all calls from that person with ‘phone not switched on’ message? Or instead of checking your silent phone every time the screen lights up during a not-so-important-meeting to see if this is your sick mother/wife/child or Big Boss calling, you could just activate a ‘busy for others, available to important people only’ mode/whitelist ?
Clearly the ‘passive address list’ used as the address book in most phones is not enough and Jaiku is one application that could make a difference. The quest for a unified address book has not yet seen a full solution and the future looks bright!
That’s all folks!
View profile
Posts in English
