With all the apps and functions today’s phones can perform, we often tend to forget that their main purpose and basic function is to make actual phone calls.
But in a world where everything is immediate and our need for instant gratification trumps all else, it is a frustrating fact of life that after dialing a contact’s number, we still have to wait an agonizing five to 10 seconds before the person actually answers. A full 10 seconds wasted! Oh, the travesty! Indeed, some stats say we spend 30 hours a year on average listening to ring back tones.
To help impatient attention-span deficient people deal with this abhorrent waste of precious time, some firms have come up with “funtones” which plays a more pleasant tune, song, or melody in place of the obnoxious “Ring Ring” tone and helps pass the time. Companies like Comverse deploy those services as VAS for operators.
But now a new company by the name of Joyp is trying to utilize this “waiting time” in a different way. Rather than forcing callers to listen to a pre-chosen song, it enables users to leave massages that will be heard when a voice call is made.
Joyp is voice-based social-networking tool, and when you make a call, you’ll hear any Joyps that your friends have sent you.
For example, if you want to remind an individual or a group about an upcoming party, you can record a Joyp, send it out to selected people, and next time that group of people makes a call, no matter who they’re calling, they’ll hear that message instead of a ringtone.
Joyp’s messages can also been heard directly from the app, like visual voicemail.
The app is free and recording/listening to messages does not use airtime, using data – or in this case VOIP – instead.
Users can take advantage of the social connection to Facebook and use Joyp as a social way of leaving messages, but the firm also plans to launch its own content service soon – an audio RSS reader that will play the latest headlines from selected feeds.
To take part in the Joyp experience, however, both sides need to download the Joyp client, unlike regular Funtones which are an operator side service. The connection to social networks should do the viral distribution trick, however.
Joyp is now available for iPhone and the firm says it will be releasing an Android version soon too. End of call.
