ThinkingPhones Acquires Contactive--Telephony Playing Catch-up

My email client is an amazing thing. By using a couple of different plugins (in my case the FullContact and Rapportive Gmail add-ons) I can get a wealth of information about the person sending me an email – their various social profiles, a history of our communication and, assuming they use Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, a pretty good handle on what they had for breakfast. I’ve come to take this sort of in-depth information for granted, but it is only when making a regular old phone call that I realize just how much more advanced email is to telephony.

ThinkingPhones, a vendor that delivers  unified communications produc, is aiming to change this with its recently announced acquisition of Contactive. Contactive connects profile and identities to a telephone number – in doing so it creates a “graph” of an individual’s identity.

Co-founded by Julio Viera and Iñaki Berenguer, Contactive is an Android call management app that automates the process of searching phone numbers and names, scanning public directories, and sifting through multiple social network updates to display information about a caller right as the call is coming in. Contactive gathers information from a large list of sources that includes Facebook, Twitter , LinkedIn, Gmail, Yelp, Google Places, White/Yellow Pages, and Contactive’s Global Directory.

Contactive itself has an enterprise offering, Klink. Klink takes the various data points about a caller and offers a sales productivity platform that helps professionals identify and personalize their customer engagements with real-time sales and social data. Klink also automates the process of updating customer records and logging calls. Klink also integrates with other systems of record (CRM for example).

This is an interesting acquisition – while there are a number of consumer offerings that deliver more insight about phone callers, enterprises tend not to have many options open to them. By integrating Klink into its existing communications offerings, ThinkingPhones will deliver a very specific value proposition to its customers. It’s something of a no-brainer, as Steve Kokinos, ThinkingPhones CEO said:

Since most employees already Google people or businesses to read more about them on Linkedin , Twitter, or Yelp , it only makes sense that smartphones should do that work in real-­time for every incoming call in the enterprise setting.

Stay tuned to see where this acquisition goes.