In October last year, we introduced what we thought would be a small new feature – mobile caller ID. It’s turned out to be the most popular thing we’ve ever done – yesterday the service crossed 250,000 registered users – and it’s become the focus of the whole company. We’ve decided to rename the company to make it clearer what we do: Mr. Number.

We’re also announcing today that our progress in caller ID has allowed us to develop a whole new approach to detecting telemarketers and other problem callers automatically. Every time one of our users gets a call or text from someone who is not in her address book, Mr. Number knows about it. Over the last six months we’ve discovered that telemarketers, debt collectors, and other nuisances have very distinctive calling patterns. Based on this research, we can now identify phone spam based on calls to just a handful of users. Instead of a name, our caller ID app displays “Suspicious number”.

Please join us at http://mrnumber.com, subscribe to http://mrnumber.com/blog, and comment over there. (This will be the last post at skydeck.com.) You can continue using the Skydeck app on your phone, but if you want new features going forward you need to download Mr. Number – available today at BlackBerry Appworld, iTunes, and the Android Market. Thanks for all your support!

Caller ID and reverse lookup have become Skydeck’s most popular features. If you get a lot of phone calls from people who aren’t in your address book, Skydeck can turn those numbers into names. Currently, Skydeck can deliver a name – not just city and state – for more than 50% of cell phone numbers and over 90% of landline numbers, and our results are getting better every day. We’re tracking thousands of telemarketers, debt collectors, and other scourges so that you can screen your calls.

Skydeck Reverse Lookup now works on almost every phone sold by AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile and costs $9.99 per month. Just visit m.skydeck.com from your cell phone to get started.

We started releasing new versions of Skydeck for Android in November, but it took longer than we expected to support the new Verizon Droid (because Google rewrote the contact management system for version 2.0 of the Android operating system, if you are interested).

Get Skydeck now from the Android Market on your phone.

Back Up

You can back up all your iPhone contacts wirelessly, you can manage them online, and you can move them to a new iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android device if you lose or replace your phone.

Look Up

Every time you call or text a number that is not in your address book, Skydeck Caller ID will look up that number for you and let you add it to your contacts with one click.

Keep Up

You can keep all your contacts up to date. Ask any number of friends for an update via Skydeck and the app will gather all their responses and update your iPhone address book for you. If you are both Skydeck members, we’ll keep your contact information up to date automatically.

For the first time, you can keep your contacts up to date by connecting Skydeck to Facebook. Skydeck will check to see which of your phone contacts are friends with you on Facebook and import all their profile photos for you – not just once but every time they change their photos in the future.

Skydeck for iPhone is a free app, and we hope you like it. We have lots more features in the works; let us know what you’d like to see next in the comments.

There’s a new model emerging for startups like Skydeck. You build simple products with easy-to-understand features, you release them for free to gauge demand, and then you develop them further in collaboration with your users until they reach a point where the value you’re creating and the business model become obvious.

After a year in development and a lot of iterations, the BlackBerry version of Skydeck has reached that point. We have many more features in mind, but we were overwhelmed by the response to the beta release of Caller ID. It now makes sense for us to charge for Skydeck. Starting tonight for new users, Skydeck’s Backup and Caller ID service for BlackBerry smartphones is $9.99 per month.

We want to say thank you to everyone who has helped us develop Skydeck to this point, and the simplest way to do that is to continue to provide the service to you for free. If you joined Skydeck anytime before today (December 3, 2009) at 5pm, the BlackBerry version of Skydeck is still free for you. Yes, there are rewards for being an early adopter.

Versions of Skydeck for Android (and soon the iPhone!) will remain free for now, as we have more work to do on those.

We’ve updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to reflect the change, so please take a moment to look at those.

Thanks again for all your help. We have lots more in the works.

What does that mean? If you have a brand new Storm, or an old Storm that just got upgraded to OS 5.0, go to m.skydeck.com on your phone and download the latest version of Skydeck.

If you downloaded one of the “unofficial” releases of OS 5.0 for your Curve/Tour/Bold/etc., we’re sorry, but Skydeck may not work for you yet.

This is really interesting. Bear with me.

For years, US carriers have locked customers into long-term contracts by offering them a ‘cheap’ new phone. It seems like a great deal, until you realize that the carrier has crippled the phone. Some features don’t work at all. Some require you to pay the carrier an extra fee. And there are lots of restrictions on third-party apps (like Skydeck).

So why don’t more people pay up for the unlocked, uncensored version of their phone?

As recently as 2007, most US carriers did not allow you to bring your own phone to their network. They loosened up that year, partly because of the public debate about wireless net neutrality. Still, consumers kept taking the blue pill: the restricted but subsidized phone. Some argued that American consumers were in love with the words ‘free’ and ‘cheap’, and that for their own protection, market-distorting handset subsidies needed to be regulated or banned.

The real problem was that when you signed a 2-year contract with a carrier, the cost of a ‘free’ phone was built into the monthly fee whether you wanted it or not. You might be smart enough to know that the phone wasn’t really free, but you couldn’t do anything about it. If you declined the carrier phone, the only money you could save was the upfront price — zero, if the phone was free. And if you brought your own phone to the network, you ended up paying for two.

Today, T-Mobile became the first carrier in the US to offer monthly plans with and without a phone at different price points. At the high end, the new Even More Plus plan promises unlimited voice, text, and web access for $99.99 if you take their phone and $79.99 if you don’t. Of course, the $99.99 plan requires you to sign a 2-year contract, so that T-Mobile can earn back the subsidy. For the first time in the US, you can see that the true cost of your phone is the sticker price plus $480. But more importantly, for the first time you can decline that phone and save not just the sticker price but the $480 too. If you have an unlimited plan with AT&T and you are happy with your current phone, you can switch to T-Mobile and save $20 per month. If you are in the market for a new smartphone, your budget just went up by $480.

Everywhere else in the world, consumers buy their phones and phone service independently. That’s because everywhere else in the world T-Mobile’s new plan is the norm. If other US carriers follow T-Mobile’s lead, it could transform the domestic market.

But T-Mobile has very little to lose, because they place fewer restrictions on their phones than any other big carrier; their business model doesn’t depend on you taking the blue pill. Who will be next?

Do you answer and sometimes wish you hadn’t? Or do you let it go to voicemail and hope they leave a message?

Starting today on Blackberry smartphones, Skydeck gives you another option: ignore the call and Skydeck will tell you who rang. (If you have the right phone and carrier, we’ll let you know while the phone is still ringing.)

Wait – hasn’t Skydeck always looked up unknown numbers?

Yes, but we only looked up landline numbers. It turns out that 80% of the calls that Skydeck users receive on their cell phones come from other cell phones.

Also, we didn’t let you know when we found a name and we gave you only two options: add every name found to your phone contacts, or never add them at all. It was … mysterious. You still have those options, but the default setting for the new version of Skydeck is that we prompt you on your phone when we recognize a new number, and let you add it to your address book with one click.

Can I control what other people see?

Yes! If you call another Skydeck member and they don’t have you in their address book, they’ll see the name, description, and photo from your Skydeck profile (your “Me Card”).

Where does Skydeck get the data?

The data comes from multiple sources, primarily the cell phone companies. But their information is often wrong or out of date. So Skydeck checks names (and names only) against the address books of other users who have opted in to Skydeck Caller ID. One of our core principles is that your data is private by default, so Skydeck Caller ID is strictly opt in. If you are not interested, nothing has changed for you.

New users will be offered Caller ID at sign up. If you are already a user, launch Skydeck on your phone and visit the Settings menu to enable Caller ID. (If you don’t see “Settings” on the menu, you don’t have the most recent version of the app. Launch the browser on your phone and visit skydeck.com to download it.)

We’ve updated our privacy policy and our terms of service to reflect the new feature, so please review those.

Can Skydeck see through blocked numbers?

No. Skydeck Caller ID is based on the principle that the person calling you has already given you their cell phone number; if they haven’t, we don’t try to discover it. (This means that you can block Skydeck Caller ID the same way you block normal caller ID.)

Our advice: if the number is blocked, it’s either the President or a telemarketer, and odds are it’s a telemarketer. But if you are getting harassing phone calls from a blocked number, contact your cell phone company – they can help.

Can I see results while the phone is still ringing?

If you are on AT&T or have reliable 3G or WiFi coverage from T-Mobile, yes. Go to Advanced Settings on Skydeck on your phone and choose “pre-call” Caller ID.

This won’t work on Verizon or Sprint, since they use a different network technology that doesn’t permit simultaneous voice and data. (It’s the same reason you can’t fetch new email or get turn-by-turn directions while making a phone call.)

How much does it cost?

While in beta, Skydeck Caller ID is free. We plan to keep it that way, but we’re working on versions for Android, iPhone, and other platforms, and we want to see how users respond before we make any final decisions on pricing.

Thanks for using Skydeck, and let us know if you find Caller ID accurate and useful.

There’s a battle brewing for control of your mobile address book. Don’t be surprised. Tap Tap Revolution or Twitterberry may get the love, but the address book is the most valuable app on your phone.

Phone numbers are not like email addresses. Those are often sensible or have a display name attached, and the message itself may have a signature. Xobni has shown that you can build an address book on the fly in Outlook by mining the headers and content of your email. Phone numbers are almost random. Area codes are losing their meaning thanks to virtual numbers and number portability; no major mobile operator supports Caller Name Display; there is no (official) directory of cell phone numbers; and you can’t sign a phone call. Unless you have a gift for memorizing 10-digit numbers, you have to maintain your own little routing table.

It’s tedious enough to stop some people from switching carrier if they can’t take their address book with them. In the US, most phones do not have swappable SIM cards. Until recently, few allowed third-party apps to access the address book, and almost none support SyncML out of the box. (This is why popular European services like Zyb, Soocial, and Funambol are not well known in the US – they were all originally based on SyncML.) Some carriers offer wireless backup and restore, but only between their own phones. Some even block you from sharing contacts one a time over Bluetooth. To transfer your address book, you have to hack your phone with BitPim or buy a $40 gizmo like Backup-Pal or CellStik.

But there’s much more at stake than “churn.”

Unlike email, every call and text costs you money. The amount you pay often varies based on the number that you dial. Calls to your “Fave 5” are free, out-of-network calls cost more than in-network, international more than domestic and so on. (Readers in Europe who were feeling smug about their relatively open phones can stop now – their price plans are far more complicated and on average a call costs twice as much.)

When you look up a contact or type a name or ‘face-dial’, your address book – the application that maps names to numbers – could affect how much money your carrier makes from the call.

It could tell you that the customer you want to call is logged in to Skype, and that the friend you want to text is logged in to AIM. It could automatically route your international calls via Jajah or Rebtel. When you start typing a name that it doesn’t know, it could look up the number for you on the web.

Or … it could route your IMs over SMS, promote a particular photo-sharing site when you send a picture message, and charge you a buck for directory lookups, the same price you pay for 411 today. It all depends on which address book you choose.

Until recently, the choice was hypothetical. Consumers bought phones from carriers, not directly from the manufacturer, and so carriers had complete control over all the software on the handset, including the address book.

That’s still true up to a point – it explains why there are no VoIP-over-3G apps on the iPhone. But the rapid rise of smartphones has changed the rules. Carriers make money selling data plans, not selling their own apps. More apps sell more data plans. Giving up a little control of the platform leads to far more apps. And how many consumers are going to take the time and trouble to replace the native address book on their phone with a third party app?

Enter Facebook. Facebook knows who your friends are, knows their phone numbers, and already gives you multiple ways to communicate with them. The first version of Facebook for the iPhone looked much more like a phone address book than Facebook.com.

Or consider Google Voice: it replaces your old cell phone number, and third-party apps like GVMobile and VoiceCentral replace the address book and dialer on your phone with a mobile interface to Google Voice and Google Contacts. Google Voice is still in private beta but expected to launch soon.

Anything is now possible. Twitter was designed with mobile in mind, my Twitter URL is public and easier to remember than my phone number, but you can’t DM me unless I follow you. That sounds like a good model for phone calls too. Why not build an address book around Twitter?

In the opposite corner, there are carriers, handset manufacturers, and telco vendors who think that an ‘enhanced’ address book – one that draws in information from multiple social sites – will allow carriers to participate in the success of those sites without losing control over pricing.

Yahoo, iSkoot, and Intercasting (which was acquired by Good Technology last week) all offer multi-headed clients for social networks that keep them safely away from the address book. INQ baked a version of Facebook into its first phone.

Several major carriers are developing Plaxo-style “networked” address books, so that customers can share contacts without going outside the wall.

Asurion – which competes with FusionOne to power backup services for carriers – has built a next generation address book that pulls in status updates and information about all of your contacts. Zyb has been working on something similar since Vodafone acquired it last year, and Palm has built its own version for the Pre, dynamically merging data from multiple sources to present a unified address book. (The Pre debuts next week.)

Among those who appear neutral – or yet to pick a side – are big networks like Plaxo and LinkedIn, directory services like WhitePages.com, and startups like DialPlus and Skydeck.

This is not a battle between good and evil. Consumers hate complex pricing plans, but if you choose the right one you’ll end up paying less than you would in a world of flat-rate pricing. There are companies on both sides that have an unhealthy obsession with “controlling the customer”. Proprietary standards, subsidies, and tiered pricing (at least for data) will be with us for a long time. But in the next year we’ll see a lot of innovation around the core communication apps on our phones.

And the address book is ground zero.

(Everything below is covered in the video.)

Today we’re announcing a mashup of Skydeck and Google Voice that gives you the core features of both for free.

First, in case you don’t know, what is Skydeck and what is Google Voice?

Skydeck is your cell phone online. All your calls, text messages, voicemails and contacts are backed up on Skydeck.com and you can search, read, and reply to your messages (by voice or by text) from Skydeck as if it were your cell phone.

There’s no change to your phone number or the way you use your phone. The Skydeck app on your phone backs up all of your contacts, calls and texts to Skydeck.com. If you don’t answer a call, Skydeck takes a voicemail, converts the speech to text, and sends you an email. If you are at your desk, you can call or text people from Skydeck. The call appears to come from your cell phone, so your friends will know who it is.

The catch? Skydeck can’t help you with your other phones, and the full version of Skydeck isn’t free.

Google Voice is a cool new service that ties all your phones together with one new number that rings them all. You answer the nearest one. But if you use a cell phone most of the time and you just want to manage it online using Google Voice, it doesn’t work very well:

* You have to change your phone number
* You have to change the way you make phone calls and place all your calls through Google
* If Google Voice is down, no one can reach you at all

What you really need is for Skydeck to manage your cell, and for Google Voice to manage your other phones. That’s what mashups are for.

Sign up for the free version of Skydeck and it will keep track of all your contacts, calls, and texts. Starting today, if you go to My Account → External Voicemail in Skydeck, we’ll show you how to configure your phone so that the calls you miss go to Google Voice. You can tell Google to try all your other phones first, or go straight to voicemail. Either way, the messages are copied to Skydeck, so that all your cell phone calls, texts, and voicemails are in one place.

It’s all free. There’s no need to change your number, no need to change the way you make phone calls, and if the whole Internet goes down your cell phone is not affected.

Why are we doing this? It’s cool. It costs us very little. And if some people decide to upgrade to the full version of Skydeck to take advantage of our near 100% accurate voicemail transcription or unlimited domestic calling (without using your cell phone minutes), we won’t complain.

That’s how you get the core features of Skydeck and Google Voice for free. Go crazy.