"Painless, Free, Open Phone Data": launched http://digits.cloudvox.com/ , a free REST API & service to find location, carrier, and metadata about any phone number or area code/prefix.
Given at eComm 2010: http://america.ecomm.ec/2010/open-phone-data.php
Augmented reality is about appending data to one's physical view. This is about augmenting phone numbers with additional context. Replace human mental effort with lightweight automation and glue.
This is a random phone number
This is as much data as is available about it for free
and here's where that data came from. Hit the URL, no API key or credentials required.
I'm happy to announce the Cloudvox open phone number lookup API, digits.cloudvox.com. Take any phone number you care about
append it to digits.cloudvox.com
and if you want a machine-readable answer, append .json
We're solving problems that should have been solved years ago. This data has been way, way harder to access than it should have been. Cloudvox itself is about letting Web developers, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople access the telecom world with no infrastructure or effort, and this is the same for telecom metadata.
I want to finally get phone number info in a form that's so easy to consume that apps move past showing "naked" numbers The REST API is the first-class feature - can hit /2064445555 or /2064445555.json to get back info about that number. No key or login needed, and completely free. Because this is ancillary to Cloudvox's business, we aren't trying to make money from it - we just want it to exist
I wanted: Free Few or no modifications to my data. If clients have to do a ton of manipulation, it's not worth the time. Should be query & display in whatever number format or detail level I already have Loose. Doesn't need to be perfect - not dispatching SWAT teams Anonymous for me. Don't need to sign up or dink with preferences in my app. Want to distribute/move my consumers around without screwing with credentials/API keys Anonymous for numbers. Isn't reverse lookup to get a name or something - I don't care about the actual caller's personal info Thoroughly documented. Real code samples I can copy and paste to see it work exactly as described. No attribution required. it's JSON or DNS, no questions asked Centralized effort. Where possible, expose more data to me without making me augment again later
FREE so I don't have to think twice about using it PAINLESS so we can all be lazy consumers OPEN so it's unencumbered and works anonymously
I want whatever I can get, but i'm not willing to pay for every query and I'm okay with it not being exact. Like 1970s Bell vs modern VoIP, this is cheap (free), good enough, and light years better than nothing. I think this is the mainstream need for phone number data
See: http://digits.cloudvox.com/ - bookmarklet http://help.cloudvox.com/faqs/digits/google-spreadsheets-phone-location-custom-function - Google Spreadsheet phoneLocation custom function
If an API is built in the forest and no one consumes it, did it really exist? If your web app touches or displays phone numbers, consider integrating this data. If you can't (or want other stuff), let me know
Built from the ground up to be integrated by other Web sites/apps - to finally get phone number info in a form that's so easy and accessible (and free) that apps can move past showing phone numbers "naked" with no other data. Thou shalt loosely couple.