Ringya: A Snappy Solution For Organizing Your Contacts

If you’ve ever needed a better way to manage your contact lists directly on your iPhone, a new app called Ringya (yeah I know, kind of a dopey name, but stay with me here) can help. But what makes this Address Book replacement app interesting is one of the methods it supports for adding contacts to your groups: you can just take a picture of a contact list that’s printed out on paper. That may seem like a niche use case (who uses paper?!), but it’s actually surprisingly helpful. I’ve already found a handful of paper lists sitting around my house, and for business users, it’s likely even more common.

[youtuber youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJEIndGKoVw&feature=player_embedded’]

The big idea here is that we haven’t completely transitioned into an all-digital world. There are still contact lists hanging on bulletin boards, stuffed in customer files, passed around at PTA meetings, etc. And many of these types of lists are still on paper, whether they’re handwritten or printouts of a Microsoft Office file someone created, but that you don’t have access to. Ringya lets you use your iPhone to snap a picture of that list which it then processes in the cloud using a combination of OCR and human support. It then places the contacts into a group you create and name. In my limited tests with lists found around the house, it worked – even managing to read my chicken-scratch handwriting, although handwritten lists aren’t mentioned as being supported in the Ringya FAQ.

Ringya was founded by Gal Nachum, Kobi Hecht, Arie Gofer and Yoram Goren, who together have founded and sold a number of startups, including Unipier Mobile Ltd., Cash-U Mobile Technologies Ltd., Mobix Communications Ltd. and Synopsis Systems Ltd. Ringya is now a team of eight with offices both in the U.S. (Chicago) and Israel, and has $1.5 million in VC funding from undisclosed investors based in Luxembourg, New York, and Israel.
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Via TechCrunch
Photo by Ringya