Israeli Startup Ringya, The First Collaborative Address Book For Smartphones?

An Israeli startup called Ringya has put an interesting new twist on the address book. They’ve taken, probably your most social set of data and added social functionality. Ringya allows users to share their address book, as much or as little of it as they want, as seamlessly as sharing a photo, video or other digital asset.

Sure you’ve always been able to share vcards and contacts via text, but Ringya groups contacts together any way that you like and than allows you to share them individually or in lists. Say you have a project management list, or a soccer team list, whatever list you have set up for contacts, if you need to easily share that list you can.

What’s even more interesting though is Ringya’s ability to turn paper lists into smartphone contact lists. Simply snap a picture of an actual paper contact list and Ringya will extract that information and put it into digital contact format and keep the list in tact.

In the interview below Gal Nucham, founder of Ringya, explains that all you have to do is snap a picture of a contact list and email it to a specific Ringya address, moments later you get the same list back, digitally. This would make migrating paper phone books, address books and black books a cinch.

It’s hard to believe that until now, no one has done this before. Check out our interview with Nucham, after the break.

What is Ringya?

Ringya is the first collaborative address book for smartphones!

Until now, people could share many digital assets (images via Instagram and Facebook, videos via YouTube, files via Dropbox) but they weren’t able to share one of their most important assets – contacts. So we decided to create a social address book that allows users to more effectively manage their contacts.

Ringya effortlessly transforms all your contact lists into organized, sharable, digital lists on your smartphone. With one click, class lists, work contacts, sport team rosters, and club/association membership lists, become lists, or “Rings”, in the Ringya app and can be jointly managed by their members.

With Ringya, you can easily email or text individuals or the entire group, access contact information of anyone in your lists via organized “Rings”, and know who’s calling and how they fit into your world with smart caller ID (eg. John Smith, Director, Axiom Sales Team or Stacy Johnson, Tim Johnson’s mother, Fairview School 2nd Grade). You can share your lists with other members of the group and, when anyone updates contact info, the entire group gets the new information.

In layman’s terms, how does it work?

Within the app, you can simply snap a picture of a paper contact list or email a digital version to rings@ringya.com and Ringya transforms it into a smart mobile list…so you have your contact lists right at your fingertips with zero effort.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Launched in September 2012 by Gal Nachum, Kobi Hecht, Arie Gofer and Yoram Goren, Ringya creates innovative technology that makes lives easier for smartphone owners by putting peoples’ contacts at their fingertips. The company has developed unique technology that provides group collaboration, contextual contact management and advanced data capture capabilities.

The four co-founders have a rich history of collaborating on innovative technology concepts. Together, they have founded and sold a number of successful startups, including Unipier Mobile Ltd., Cash-U Mobile Technologies Ltd., Mobix Communications Ltd. and Synopsis Systems Ltd.

Where are you based?

Ringya is based in Israel with an office in the U.S.

What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?

Israel has a hot startup scene that’s fondly referred to as “Silicon Wadi”. According to the book Start-Up Nation, Israel has the highest density of tech start-ups in the world, despite a population of just 7.1 million people and more companies listed on the NASDAQ than any country outside the U.S., even though it’s a tiny fraction of the size. There are many successful startups here – it’s where instant messaging, the USB flash drive and solar water heating were invented. And now Ringya is redefining the smartphone address book.

How did you come up with the idea for Ringya?

The idea about Ringya originated from the realization that the average person is no longer able to adequately manage his own personal address book. The sheer amount of contacts and the pace at which contact information changes, makes it a tedious and immensely time consuming task to manage the information and keep it up to date. We realized that collaboration is the only way to address this challenge and have set out to develop the technology for a social address book.

As a working dad, each school year, when I got my kids’ class lists, I manually inserted the names of my kids’ best friends’ parents into my phone and everyone else remained on my fridge. My work contact sheet was tacked to my bulletin board. I manually inputted the names of the three or four coworkers with whom I regularly collaborated but if I needed to reach anyone else on the fly, I was out of luck if I wasn’t by my bulletin board. And all my other teams and clubs were in an emailed list somewhere in cyberspace.

So my fellow geeks and I put our heads together and came up with a way to get all those contact lists onto the phone and share the contact lists with group members so everyone collaborates on maintaining fully up to date information.

How did you come up with the name?

We were looking for a catchy name that related to address books and contacts. We thought of the slang phrase, “I’ll ring ya,” and thought it had a nice ring to it…pun intended!

What problem does Ringya solve?

Many of us get our work contact lists emailed to us or we have a printout hanging on our bulletin board. We have contact lists with client teams and, if we’re parents, we get class lists, sports team rosters, and on and on. If you want these numbers on our smartphone we have to manually input the numbers and we have to input the changes each time. That’s a lot of work and it floods your address book.

With Ringya, getting your contact lists onto your phone is effortless and you end up with organized, searchable, sharable Rings (lists) that you can share with other group members so they can enjoy the benefits of Ringya. And when any member updates contact info, the entire group gets the updated info.

What’s your secret sauce?

I believe technology is the answer to simplifying day-to-day tasks. I’ve dedicated my career to offering fun and accessible solutions that bestow order on our increasingly complex lives. I am also a true believer in social networks, collaboration and crowdsourcing as the paradigms shaping many of nowadays great new services and innovations. These elements, when applied to the challenge of managing the address book, are our secret sauce.

In a nutshell, I think the secret to success is delivering an easy to use solution that simplifies people’s lives…in this case, it’s a redesign of the address book.

What’s one dilemma you’ve encountered in the startup process?

We see a lot of applications especially in the address book domain that offer minimal privacy protections and in many cases even copy all the user’s contacts without the user being fully aware of this. We decided to take a strong stand on the side of consumer protection and implement the highest level privacy standard so that our users can feel confident their contact information is protected. We worked hard to develop a privacy model that would allow sharing while keeping privacy at a maximum and we believe we have successfully managed to do so.

What’s one challenge you’ve overcome in the startup process?

One of the biggest challenges was achieving a user experience that’s simple enough and extremely user friendly. We want to be innovative while maintaining a framework that doesn’t stray too far from native applications so that everything seems familiar. Plus, we need a similar concept to work across multiple platforms. Our goal was for users to feel at home whether you’re an iPhone or Android user and, at the same time, introduce an array of innovative unique features.

Who are some of your mentors and business role models?

We are following the same concept that Instagram used – to take a core function of the smartphone, enhance or improve it and make it a cross-platform network. We think this is a profound transition that these core apps are going through – from being dominated by the operating system vendors to be dominated by best of breed independent applications that are social. Instagram was the first to pull this off and show everyone the huge potential of this approach.

What’s next for Ringya?

We are thrilled to have launched the iPhone version and soon we’ll release Ringya for Android. iPhone users can download the app now and Android users can sign up and we’ll notify them as soon as the app is ready.

Linkage:

Check out Ringya here

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