The Revolutioners

Premium Number to Fight Telemarketing Spam

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Every now and then my mind keeps flooding with some insane ideas. But after some time when I think about it, it all starts making some sense. I was on my way to office 2-3 days ago and I get a call from someone trying to sell me some Life Insurance. This guy has been calling me for i don’t know may be for the last 4-5 days continuously. I know like me you are also frustrated with all those telemarketers calling you day and night and selling stuff in which you are not even remotely interested. But I have an idea to deal with this situation. I don’t know the feasibility to implement it. May or may not be possible.

How about a service which lets you convert your normal mobile phone number to a premium call rate number. I mean I get to choose how much a person pays for a call whenever someone calls me. For example anyone calling me on my mobile would end up paying 100 Rs per minute. This way I would not be able to stop them calling me but I can ask them to call me up again and again and get them to spend money. I take revenge. And the amazing part is that you get paid a handsome amount of money at the end of the month. Because this is how premium call rate numbers work. The organization that owns these premium call rate numbers gets the share from the total revenue generated.

Now let’s talk about the downsides of this idea. Suppose I setup this service on my mobile and one of my old friends gets hold of my number and calls me up. He would end up paying 100 bucks for the call. Well I have a solution for that. I ask my operator to warn the users who are calling me about the premium call rate. That way anyone calling me would think twice before calling me.

But what about my friends, family and colleagues? Would they ever be able to call me on my cell phone?  Hmm.. I thought about that also actually. I got this idea from the recently held Apple Special Event, where Steve announced Ping. In Ping you get to choose who follow you. So basically, you get to choose a white list of numbers who would not be charged premium rates.

I know there are solutions like Block List which I used to use. But that is not universal to all phones. I think only on Nokia phones this functionality is available. And moreover the hassle of adding them in the list and keeping them updated. It’s not just worth it. And don’t forget about the limitation of number of phone numbers that you can add.

I need to think about some idea on Mobile Spam, the text messages because they seem to be bugging more than the phone calls.

Oh, one more thing. Did I tell you that well before even any mobile operator implemented this caller tune thing I had this idea in mind. I thought why not have something different than rather just that old boring Tring Tring. And to my surprise Indian Operators introduced Caller Tune to us.

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Tags: innovation, solution idea, Telecom