ON: a service to help manage your contacts and mobile in a new way…
Are you on?
Are you on?
For the past several months, I tried out the service “ON Voicefeed,” which was developed by Orange Vallée, a subsidiary of the Orange Group, in charge of innovation and development. The ON service was officially launched in February 2011.
What does ON do?
In short, ON is attempting to revolutionize the voice messaging service we have become to depend on. ON is a family of iPhone, Android and Web apps designed “to improve the way you connect to people in your mobile address books.” According to the site, ON provides two services for two different phone OS (operating systems):
- ON Voicefeed for iPhone is a smart visual voicemail system which enables you to personalize your greetings to different callers.
- ON Address Book for Android is a system which unites your address book and social networks.
One of the major challenges that I have had is that the site is not stable… I was told that this was because of the 3000+ contacts that I have in my database. Apparently, the system cannot handle more than 2000 and that the average person has 200 people in their address book. I don’t know if On is targeting just the average Joe, but for people in business, I can hardly imagine that is the case. [Think of the limit of 5,000 for Facebook ‘friends’]. Between friends, family, colleagues, clients and suppliers an average business person must have considerably more than 200 contacts. That said, I can admit that having 3000 is probably well above average.
Top 3 reasons for liking ON
In any event, here are the top 3 reasons what I liked about ON Voicefeed:
- it gives you the chance to personalize your message. This is particularly useful when you want to target with a particular language. Or for people from different communities. And, not least, to provide a more charming note to your loved ones. (See below for an example of the interface).
- it allows you to turn text into voice messages which you can target for a specific person (i.e. you can surreptitiously write a message for someone who might call you while you are otherwise indisposed
- you can access your voice messages while abroad without incurring roaming fees.
Dear Jane….
If my overall experience was not favorable because of the instability of the platform considering my swollen address book, I must avow that I was given great attention by the Orange customer service and they did try to help me through my problems. Kudos! I think for anyone whose address book is more reasonable, it would be worth the try. In any event, the concept is absolutely brilliant. You can download the app here (via iTunes link).
