The marriage between UK-based New Call Telecom and Netherlands-based cross-platform mobile calling and messaging app Nimbuzz has given birth to Holaa! on Thursday.
Holaa! is a free caller ID app that lets users see the callers’ name, photo and their location during an incoming call.
“It also helps you block spam calls from pesky spammers or other unwanted callers. On average, four out of 10 calls are from unknown numbers while one out of those four unknown calls is a spam. This app addresses that specific problem,” Nigel Eastwood, CEO of New Call Telecom, told Gulf News.
The app is downloadable for free from the Android store and it allows users to search people’s names based on their phone numbers and alerts the registered users if the caller is marked as spam by other members of the community.
It can synchronise with Facebook and Google accounts into the phone book and is available in Arabic, English, Persian, French and Portuguese.
“We have been looking at problems in communicating in emerging markets in the last 12 months and trying to address those with a new breed of applications,” Eastwood said.
New Call Telecom has taken a 70 per cent stake in Nimbuzz in a deal valued at $250 million (Dh918 million). Nimbuzz has 210 million registered users, mostly in India, Middle East and North Africa regions
In emerging markets, predominantly, he said that people have prepaid services. In India, it is 84 per cent. There are huge problems as people swap their SIMs very often which lead to ending up with spam calls or pesky callers.
“With Nimbuzz we did it for chatting and free VoIP calls. We hope to do the same with Holaa! for call management,” said Ziad Rahhal, managing director for Nimbuzz Mena.
Penetrated consumer brand
The company’s target is to have 10 million downloads in the next year.
“We have already achieved 50,000 downloads as of now since the launch of beta version for the last couple of weeks. It is very effective in minimising the demand on a smartphone like using less memory and battery life,” he said.
“We want to break into the Middle East, North Africa and Indian markets as a penetrated consumer brand. Social messaging still lags in India and the Middle East compared to the west. We see a great opportunity as consumers have started embracing social messaging more,” he said.
Nimbuzz has 50 million registered users in the Middle East and North Africa and 30 million users in India.
“What we are starting to see is that Nimbuzz as a business translating more into an incubator for really exceptional emerging markets focused communication products on over the top services to complement not only for Nimbuzz users.
“What we are seeing today is only 10 per cent of the functionality of the app and one of the key areas is addressing the business strategy of small- and medium-sizes businesses. I see a great opportunity to empower the SMB user. SMB users in the emerging markets have a very small voice. What we are trying to do is add more voice to SMBs,” Eastwood said.
