‘Caller. Share what’s happening right now, using just your voice’
Callre was inspired by research into Citizen Journalism, and how I could create a platform for sharing information in realtime that was simple, honest, accessible and cheap.
Simple
When a thought is worth sharing immediately, technology should gracefully do that, and nothing more. Caller is not an app, it’s a service. To share, you just dial the number, and Caller records what every your phone can hear. That’s it.
Honest
Trust can be fickle online. Through the internet we often loose our instinctual ability to tell trust from deception. Caller is about your voice, and every minute, fallible, human detail within it.
Accessible
Whilst the growing prevalence of smartphones creates endless opportunities for innovation in mobile technology, the entry price point for a high-end device, where the best apps live, is still far too high. I designed and built Caller to be a great experience from a £10 phone right the way up to ultra-high resolution personal computers.
Cheap
Right now, I pick up the bill. You only pay for the calls and texts you make to Caller. Caller has local numbers in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, so the cost is most likely covered by your service provider. A service like Caller would one day have to fund itself, through a means that wouldn’t degrade the service, and would still allow the accessible nature which Caller was created to serve.
So how are calls shared?
Users call up, record a message, and text in their location. Their message is pushed in realtime to every screen that is watching, and to all users who have setup location alerts, also performed over text message. Location alerts are simple to setup, and easy to delete, all via text message.
Caller is a Ruby on Rails Web App I built, running on a Heroku, using Twilio for telephony, Pusher for realtime push, and Google for Maps and Geo Services. This was definitely the most difficult coding challenge I’ve taken on to date, but also the most rewarding.
Feel free to try out Caller and leave a message. www.callr.at