Humin Contacts App Launches On Android, Expands Support To Canada And Europe

Since fully launching in August this year Humin, the app that aims to replace your iPhone contacts app, has garnered a number of favourable reviews. This is in large part because it handles contacts in the way that you might. Humin gathers data from your phone, Facebook and LinkedIn contacts and combines them with your calendar, email and voicemail to provide context to your contacts. And today it’s launching internationally and an Android version.

Humin will now be available in: UK, Canada, Germany, France, Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Leichtenstein and Luxembourg.

The app has been fully translated to support German, French, and Dutch.

It also now supports Call Logs and Voicemail for users with European Wireless Carriers including: Vodafone, BT, T-Mobile, 3, Telus, O2, Rogers, Bell, Orange, Swisscom, and others.

The new update include the feature that Contacts now show full history of recent calls, texts, emails, voicemails, and calendar meetings directly in their profile.

Search has been expanded to support queries for things like: broader city regions, people you’ve emailed/called/or texted recently, people who have left voicemails, people who work or study with other contacts, and more. For instance, a searches like “Lives in New York Area” or “emailed last week” or “left me voicemails last week” and so on.

The revamped Verify feature can help users clean up their out of date contact info and replace it with current emails and phone numbers.

A useful addition is that Humin no longer requires a Facebook account to use the app.

Names and contact info are also stored within the normal iPhone contacts app as well.

Humin also says the speed of the app has been improved.

Searching contacts on location, time, recent interactions, context of work or education, who you know in common and rich profiles with pictures is very powerful. Plus, you can add contacts and share you information very easily.

CEO Ankur Jain says: “We realised contacts was a search problem, so you have to understand identity. Even Facebook and LinkedIn know people in a different manner. So we needed a user-centric search engine, like page rank for google. With the context of time and location.

Security-wise – crucial with contacts – Humin says it encrypts and anonymizes all info gathered about you and your contacts, putting only meta-data into the Cloud, and storing all key passwords on the device itself, encrypted from Humin.

He says the short-term business model is emerging markets where the first interaction with digital is via a smartphone, not a PC. A longer term play will come in applying its contextual engine to any number of things, from cars to the Internet of Things to augmented reality.

Competitors might include LinkedIn’s recently launched standalone Connected app for professional contacts, but Humin is both personal and professional.

Will.i.am, Richard Branson and Angry Birds creator Peter Vesterbacka were all part of the private beta launch a few months back. It might not hurt that Jain is the son of Intelius CEO Naveen Jain who likely as not knows all those guys. That said, Jain Junior is card-carrying entrepreneur in his own right. And is well-connected. He also started the Kairos Society, an annual conference that hooks up college-age entrepreneurs with corporate executives and public figures, like Bill Clinton.