First Look at Humin, the App That Wants to Take Over Your Phone - Webmaster News

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Many of the most popular iOS apps are ones that replace Apple’s stock apps: Calendar, email and messaging clients are all consistently at the top of the charts in iTunes. But there’s one app that comes on every iPhone that doesn’t get much attention from third parties — the actual phone app.

But a new app wants to do for the phone app what WhatsApp did for messaging, or what Mailbox did for email. In short, Humin wants to be your new phone.

Humin combines contacts, dialing and voicemail into one app, and uses contextual information to predict who your most important contacts are, and who you are most likely to want to connect with at any given time.

Ankur Jain, founder and CEO of Humin, believes the way most smartphone users approach their contacts list is fundamentally broken. He likens it to the state of online search engines in the mid-90s.

“It’s almost identical to the problem the Internet faced in the ’90s,” Jain told Mashable. “People forget, but you used to browse the web by alphabetical categories. Eventually, companies like Google realized you should be able to just search information the way you think about it so you can find what’s relevant. We can not only predict who you want to connect with, but you can also search for people the way you think.”

Humin contextualizes the relationships you have with your contacts by displaying personal details about each individual, and organizing contacts based on their relationship to you, instead of alphabetically. For example, when viewing a contact, you’ll see a menu of friends you both have in common.

Humin’s app allows you to add context, such as where and how you met, to your contacts.

Upon launching Humin, the first contacts the app surfaces are those who live nearby, and those who with whom you have connected recently or frequently — in other words, people you’re most likely to want to talk to in that moment.

And the app changes with you. Go to a new town, and the first contacts you see will be friends in your new location. Humin takes this a step further when you add a new contact from within the app: It allows you to record personal details such as phone number and email, as well as contextual information such as where and how you met.

The more you use the app, the more it learns from you, and the better its predictions will become.

Humin has been in development for more than a year and a half, and has been in private beta for the past few months. Earlier this month, Humin launched its early-access program, which enabled employees at some Fortune 100 companies to use it. The app will make its debut in the App Store in a few weeks.

Although Humin is initially launching on iOS, Jain said the company plans to take the app to Android, and can even see it potentially coming to other platforms such as Google Glass.

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Source: http://mashable.com/2014/06/01/humin-app-first-look/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss