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Truecaller

Truecaller Launches ‘Open Doors’ Inspired From Clubhouse: How it works

Truecaller has released Open Doors, a clubhouse-style private audio communication app. You can start a chat, and your friends will be notified when they can join. When they join, their friends will be notified, and they will be able to join as well. As a result, as you can see, the number of people participating in the chat expands due to the network effect. Truecaller has a large cache and user base to promote this network effect, with over 300 million daily active users. Most certainly, you are one of those users. So, if you’re intrigued about Open Doors, we’ve got the essential information for you right here.

What Is Open Doors?

Open Doors is a free social media program in which players engage with others solely through voice. In that way, it could be regarded as a Clubhouse substitute. True Software Scandinavia AB, the parent firm of Truecaller, Caller ID, and spam prevention service, created it. The app’s user interface is currently available in English, Hindi, Spanish, Latin, and French. In the future, other languages will be introduced. The software provides a communication platform that both existing Truecaller users and new users can use to initiate and join audio chats. These audio discussions will then invite more people through the ‘network effect,’ as Truecaller refers to it.

Truecaller
Image source: static.tnn.in

How does It work?

If you are already a Truecaller user, you may sign in with only one tap, the business says in the news release. A missed call or an OTP will be used to verify your phone number if you don’t enter it first. Additionally, you must allow two permissions: phone permission and contacts permission (for the network effect) (to conduct audio conversations). In case you’re worried, the firm assures you that the other party in the conversation won’t see your phone number. Again, you are free to start and stop a chat whenever you like. Notifications to join the chat will be sent to your friends (contacts), as well as to their friends. A link to someone wanting to join the chat can be shared by anyone participating in it.

Is It Safe?

It’s noteworthy to note that during a chat, only the participants’ names and profile photographs are shown; phone numbers are not displayed. Additionally, users have total control over their personal data because the program only needs two permissions. Other features include the ability to customize who receives notifications when you join a conversation and the ability to respond to what others are saying. Additionally, the app will provide users fine-grained control over how it alerts them to new Open Doors talks.

Both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store will provide Open Doors at no charge. The seamless app experience across both platforms, according to Truecaller, is another boast. The group chats will be moderated by the Open Doors community, but the private talks will remain private and will not be stored anywhere.

Thanks to Truecaller being 13 years in the business, we’ve spent a great deal of time learning about how people communicate. Our new app Open Doors was born out of a simple question – how can we help people make new connections without being intrusive? And this is what we want to do: to bridge the world using the most natural form of communication, our voices.” said Nami Zarringhalam, Co-founder of True Software Scandinavia AB.

Source: digit.in

It’s interesting to see truecaller release this app at a time when others, like clubhouse, seem to have fizzled out and the majority of people use Twitter spaces for similar discussions. Therefore, it will be difficult to remain relevant in a declining industry.

Slack

Slack Faces an Outage With the Start of 2021, Disrupting Thousands of Users

Ending 2020, after the holiday week, people in the United States went on to work again on Monday. But the Monday did not go very smoothly for the office messaging company Slack, as it faced an outage on the very day.

What is Slack and Why it is used

Slack is an office messaging and communication platform, developed by an American software company Slack Technologies. The app is used for sharing information, chatting, voice and video calls, transferring documents by thousands of users and companies. It has been providing its services since 2013 and has become the first choice of many companies for establishing a private network of communication for their office staff and clients. The company has also seen a hike in the number of users during the Pandemic.

The Full-Blown Outage

Slack went down at around 10 AM ET on Monday, and the users started reporting about the problem. There were issues with sending messages, loading the channel, making calls, transferring files, and many of the users even reported that they could not log in to their slack accounts. During the outage, the calendar on Slack as well as the notifications was also not working.

Slack
Image Source: slack.com

By 10:14 AM, the company also confirmed that the app was facing some issues, and later, it also acknowledged that an outage had occurred. “Customers may have trouble loading channels or connect to Slack at this time. Our team is investigating and we will follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused”, the company updated, “The problem remained for about more than two hours, and after that, the platform started working fine for some of the users at about 12:20 PM. But many of the users were still facing the interruption. The company also continued to update its official Twitter account with information regarding the problem. “

All hands are on deck on our end to further investigate,” one of its tweets said.”At 3:10 PM, the company tweeted, “We’re truly sorry for the disruption today. We’ll be back with a summary of this issue.”

Cause of the Problem

In the pandemic, the companies were heavily relying on the various messaging and video conferencing apps, including Slack, Zoom, Google, etc. This might also be a reason that those platforms were facing such issues. Last year, in the mid of December, Gmail from Google also faced a similar blackout for some time, where users were continuously getting some error messages. This outage encouraged users to shift from one platform to the other so that they could complete their work on time. But since these apps recovered in a few hours, users could use them again.

The Salesforce Deal

But those issues are not permanent, as these companies are continuously working towards improving their tools for the users. Recently, the American cloud-based software company Salesforce announced to buy Slack for an amount of $27.7 billion (roughly Rs. 2,03,400 crores) and adding more features and tools to the platform. The company also revealed that it will be merging the Slack messaging technology to its platform so that users can manage the marketing and sales teams from a single platform.

Back to Normal

After the big-blown outage, reportedly, Slack is working perfectly smooth now. “Seeing improvements with error rates on our site, and we believe affected customers should be able to access Slack,” said a spokesperson of Slack. Though thousands of people reported the issue with the platform, the company hasn’t given any figures or number of how many users faced the disruption.