Truecaller Launching New SMS Service to Target Non-Smartphone Users

Stockholm, Sweden – July 5, 2013: Today, Truecaller, the world’s largest collaborative phone directory is announcing a partnership with Innoz, India’s youngest and fastest growing mobile and wireless innovation company. Together, they will create a service for non-smartphone users to send a text to identify unknown numbers.

Innoz Technologies has a service in India called ‘55444,’ which provides information through SMS. Deepak Ravindran, CEO of Innoz, clarifies that India has more than 900 million mobile phone numbers, and it is common for people to change their phone number often.

 “The new SIM cards are available easily and at a very low price. This makes difficult to recognize the caller,” says Ravindran.  “Also, with very low internet penetration there is no medium to check the details of any caller. Truecaller on SMS gives app access to everyone. Now users can easily identify the caller identity."

The 55444 service is available for all mobile phones and is able to search Truecaller’s directory for mobile and landline numbers, even for international numbers. If the number is in the Truecaller directory, the SMS message will return name, service provider, region of the number, and the true score, which will determine how ‘popular’ a number is with Truecaller’s +20 million users.

Truecaller believes that their partnership is Innoz will be beneficial to both companies, since Truecaller is currently only available in app form for smartphones and on their official website. “We know that Truecaller is a popular service in India,” says Safa Poyraz, Truecaller’s VP of Business Development. “We want the Truecaller service to be available for those who do not have smartphones, because Truecaller has proven to be a beneficial part of many Indian’s daily lives when identifying unknown callers.”

The following is how you use the 55444 service:

1.  Type: Trace <10 Digit Mobile No>. (Eg: Trace 1234567890)

2.  Send the SMS to 55444

The SMS will be charged Rs. 1 per query.

The user will then get an immediate response with all details including the name, service provider and service region.

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About Truecaller

Truecaller is the world’s largest collaborative global phone directory, making it easy for users to get in touch with people across the globe. Truecaller’s dynamic database is always evolving, built by its community that helps keep it accurate by sharing their contacts. Users are always in control of who can see their contact information. Truecaller is available on all internet-enabled devices and on the web. Headquartered in Stockholm, Truecaller is a Swedish company with a global vision. Founded in 2009 by co-founders Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam, the company is funded by angels and Open Ocean, early VC investors in MySQL. For more information visit www.truecaller.com

About Innoz:

Innoz was among the Global 100 most promising technology companies awarded by prestigious RED Herring Magazine. Innoz runs the largest offline mobile search engine 55444 with more than 120 million users and counting. It is not another search medium on the phone, rather than searching for it online it provides the user with actual answers to their queries. The goal of Innoz is to give people more reasons to smile by their innovations, as they believe that this leads to positive things in the world.