A Phone with which you can talk to anyone whenever you want.

The product we are developing right now is a phone with which we can talk to someone, anyone whenever we want.

I had given a lot of thought to this notion of calling someone up when we have an urge to talk about something — be it things that are bothering us or things we are passionate about. I realized, after some musings, that when we are making a phone call, we are not necessarily looking for someone we know, but rather we are looking for someone, anyone who listens to what we have to say.

So the question now becomes: do we need to know the person before calling them? What would it be like if we can talk to anyone whenever we have an urge to talk to somone? (There are always more strangers than people you actually know — this means untapped human resources at your service.)

The phone itself has many challenges: first of all, it is a pain having to exchange phone numbers if you wish to call someone in particular.

(Twitter was groundbreaking in this regard since it does not require a specific address or a recipient.)

Secondly, it is rather stressful to make a phone call. The timing has to be right, and both you and the recipient need to be in the right mood to talk about the right thing. Without these “proper“ conditions, a phone conversation becomes a mere painstaking task.

Thirdly, the phone itself stopped evolving. Messaging and social networking applications of today are far more superior in these regards, and we can communicate with each other a lot more comfortably and naturally using these apps.

(Phone usage has been on the decline in recent years, and this has been brought about as a result of the advancements of digital communication. Even so, vocal communication itself will not entirely die out; the pleasure, the emotional experience it offers is not something we can replace with something else.)

However, even the evolution of these social and messaging apps has stagnated. We often communicate with only people we already know, and the communication we have there has become a mere mannerism.

We cannot expect our friend circle or our knowledge to broaden without a first hand experience in the real world, and digital communication cannot create this type of opportunities. You can share your experience and follow it up on these digital platforms, but that is pretty much all you can do on them.

(On the side note, people are getting into new technologies, such as AR/VR, wearable, or robotics, because many are frustrated with the stagnant digital communication of today.)

The digital phone has not evolving fast enough, either. Take Skype, for instance.

It is rather painful having to work around the schedule to talk to someone, and even when we manage to find the right timing, how uncomfortable it is having to hold a conversation on an unstable network? The negative outweigh the positive: these cumbersome procedures overshadow the benefit of real time, real vocal communication.

(I guess we have been neglecting the horrendous experience we have with digital phones. We simply stop thinking about what we can improve upon beyond this point.)

A phone with which we can talk to anyone whenever we want.

That what I want to create.