Revolutionary App Bring Call Management, Your Social Contacts and Over 200 MILLION Useful Numbers To The Tip Of Your Fingers

After Lawrence Coburn got us all excited about DoubleDutch (at the 1st ever SF App Pitch event in San Francisco), I met Serial Entrepreneur Steve Larsen. Steve introduced me to a hot new SmartPhone App called PhoneTell.

PhoneTell is a FREE (for end users) Android App that offers a wide variety of much needed smart phone features like call management, connection to email contacts, social networks, yellow-pages, white-pages and gigantic phone number directory of over 200 million phone numbers across the United States and Canada.

Steve Larsen is the CEO of PhoneTell. His past includes being the CEO & Co-founder of Krugle, Inc., COO of Better Life Media Group, CEO, BigFix Inc, Founding team & VP BizDev at Visage Mobile, Venture Partner at St. Paul Venture Capital , Founding team & EVP/Mktg & BizDev at Net Perceptions and Founding team & VP BizDev at TicketMaster/CitySearch.

Try that for achievements!

What is PhoneTell?

Steve: PhoneTell replaces your native dialer with a dialer that lets you connect to all of your social contacts as well as over 200,000,000 phone numbers in the US and Canada — businesses, other places you may want to call.

Can you explain that a little bit more?

Steve: A lot of times you’re in a situation where you can’t take a phone call and a phone call comes in.  What PhoneTell will do is tell you who’s calling you.  It’ll tell you if it’s Walgreen’s with a prescription, tell you it’s your dentist or could tell you it’s your best friend.  It’ll give you an answer to, rather than answer the call, to be able to send them a text message saying that you’re busy — all with just one click.

We can do that because of that database of numbers that I told you about, that we use to do a reverse lookup to tell you who’s calling.  That also helps to improve your ability to find the number that you want to call.  Even if a name isn’t in your address book on your phone, you can pretty much find it because we connect to your LinkedIn account or your Gmail account as well as connecting into white pages and yellow pages so you can find local businesses or whatever.

I’m able to respond to somebody who’s calling me instead of sending them directly to voicemail.

Steve: Instantly you can respond.  You can be much more polite.

What category does this app fall under?

Steve: Communications or connections.  It’s an app that helps you connect.  In my world, there’s two kinds of categories of applications on a mobile phone.  There are things that you do to entertain yourself between connecting with people and then there are apps that help you connect with people.  We’re one of the apps that helps you connect with people.

phonetell demo kiosk at SFAppPitch @ pariSoma, San Francisco.

What is the status of the application?

Steve: It launched on May 24th for Android.

Do you have plans to publish it for iPhones?

Steve: We will be on the iPhone in about a month and we’ll be on the BlackBerry about two weeks after that.

How much does the app cost?

Steve: It’s free to users.

What is your Business Model?  How do you make Money?

Steve: When users connect to businesses like American Airlines or United or Hertz or Geico Insurance or one of those, we get paid for connecting the user to those merchants.

What is the incentive for businesses to sign up for your service?

Steve: When people are calling you on their mobile phones, it’s because they typically want to transact.  They want what you’re buying or selling.  They’re not calling you on the phone because they’re shopping.  If somebody is at their computer at four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and they type rental cars into their browser, they want something very different than the person who is typing rental cars into their mobile phone at 9:30 at night at Miami International Airport.

In one case, they’re shopping.  In the other one, they want a damn car right now!

Tell me a little bit about the company.  When was it founded, who were the founders, are you guys funded or looking for funding?

Steve: We were founded about a year ago, by Wendell Brown and [Adrien Vanzell].  The company’s been around for about a year and it’s funded by the founders as well as angel investors.

We’re always looking for new funding.  When do we stop looking for new funding?