24 year-old app developer wants to reinvent your phone
The rise of the smartphone has made that thing you carry in your pocket a computer, a dictionary, a video and music player, or a gaming device first and a phone probably eighth or ninth.
24 year-old Ankur Jain is looking to change all that and make the phone a much more intelligent and usable feature. His new app - Humin - hopes to re-imagine the way you communicate with your smartphone. For more than a decade and ever since “contacts” became a feature on mobile devices knowing your alphabet and remembering someone’s name has been the only way to find the person you are looking for an get in touch. In other words, as Ankur says, “The most important person in your phone is Aaron.”
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Humin wants to help us remember people the way we naturally do in the context of our lives. If you were to meet someone today at a meeting and forgot their name tomorrow when you wanted to send them a follow-up, Humin allows you to search for a phrase like “the person I met in my meeting yesterday.” From there, inside the Humin app you could call, e-mail or text that person without having to remember and search through the every growing list of contacts in your phone.
As with any personal information privacy is a big concern. Jain says that Humin is one of the first apps that doesn’t store your e-mail or texts on their servers. They do store your contacts but are committed to not selling that information and there is no access to passwords as those too stay on your device.
“If the NSA or third party guys were to hack us tomorrow the data doesn’t exist,” he assures.
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Humin’s functionality might not sound like much but Jain hopes this is just the first step in a communication revolution. “If we can actually remember people the way you do we can start to get your phone and your car and your smart watches and all these different devices to help predict the people you need to reach at any given moment so you spend less time fumbling with your devices and more time actually connecting with people in the real world,” he says.
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