EAST NORTHPORT, NY - It’s becoming the bane of the digital age…you’ll be in the middle of something and you’ll feel a familiar buzz in your pocket. You reach in to retrieve the source of said buzz – your trusty cell phone – expecting a call from a friend or family member, only to find an unfamiliar number greeting you, a number inevitably belonging to a robo-caller, spammer, or outright scam artist looking to separate you from your money. In 2014, 54 percent of all customer complaints made to the Federal Communication Commission were in regards to robocalls, illustrating how prevalent this issue is to the public at large.
It’s bad enough when you get unwanted calls on your landline – especially when they’re from someone attempting to possibly rip you off – but on an allegedly private cell number whose individual minutes you’re paying for? It’s infuriating to be sure, and Whitepages is looking to end this vile practice once and for all with an exciting new app known as “Hiya.”
Whitepages, founded 19 years ago, is best known as the company that compiles public record databases on people and businesses; its former caller ID operations and app – previously known as Whitepages Caller ID – have recently been spun off into a new business model: Hiya Inc. It’s free eponymous app pulls from seeks to help users with address book management by pulling from a national phone number database of 1.5 billion individual users that enable Hiya users to identify incoming and outgoing calls, but if that was all it did then it wouldn’t have much else to distinguish itself from the literally hundreds of services that do the same exact thing.
No, where Hiya truly stands apart from the competition is the fact that this app manages to abolish the rampant epidemic of automated robo-callers, telemarketers, spam, and scammers plaguing cell phone users in recent years, allowing them to not only effectively identify when any given caller is not on the up-and-up, but even permanently block these numbers from ever interfering in their day-to-day activities ever again. As for how effective it really is, the numbers speak for themselves; since launching earlier this year, Hiya – currently available only for Android devices - has identified more than 1 billion spam calls.
In addition to sheltering its users from unwanted spam and more, Hiya also delivers news and tips about the latest phone scams, keeping people up-to-date and safe while going about their day-to-day business.
Hiya is already making waves in the industry; they can currently boast of having over 25 million users of its services, in part to heavy-hitting deals that see its app pre-loaded onto phones sold by wireless carrier T-Mobile and phone manufacturer Samsung.
This isn’t the first go-around for Hiya; originally, Whitepages utilized the brand for an app that assisted users in managing their address books; after folding, the catchy brand name has been re-purposed for Whitepages’ new venture. Hiya is headed up by Whitepages CEO Alex Algard, who said that spinning off Hiya into a separate company was the best business model to ensure continued growth and expansion, unfettered by a cluttered corporate hierarchy, he said in an interview with the International Business Times.
““It will better provide focus as a standalone company whose only mission is to make phone communication better,” he said. “It’s much better to focus as a smaller company that isn’t competing with the goals of another,”
In 2008, Whitepages was the first company to market Caller ID for Android and, according to Algard, has been an industry leader in the regard ever since. Algard notes that he has traveled the world – including countries as diverse as Korea and Mexico – in order to study different types of phone scams in order to maximize Hiya’s effectiveness. Whitepages currently employs approximately 120 people – the majority of which are engineers, some of whom are shared with Hiya – and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, where Hiya will be sharing office space as well.
The Hiya app is free, although T-Mobile users can pay $3.99 a month for additional services over and above what the standard app offers. Currently, the company generates revenue via profit sharing withsharing with its partnerships, and with offices in Seattle, New York City and Budapest – as well as plans for additional international expansion – Hiya is working diligently to sign on new partnerships, and plans on working on ways to make the mobile phone experience better for users by – in Algard’s words – making it “smarter.” It looks like he’s already well on his way to achieving that goal, in fact.
