Smartphones (well, iPhones at least) just got a little smarter with the release of Humin, a contact app that revolutionizes how contacts lists are organized.
Working best as a replacement for the default Phone app, Humin organizes contacts smartly by doing away with alphabetical lists. Instead, it arranges contact more instinctively, learning which people are most relevant given a certain context and then putting them up first for a user to see.
"Think of it like page rank for people. Every set of search results is ordered to show relevant people based on the user, time of day, place, etc. Say you can't remember someone's name, you just type in the search bar "met today" or "met last week." "It's designed the way you think. "I wanted to create a way to find your connections the way you actually think about them," explains Ankur Jain, Humin CEO and Co-founder.
Taking a cue from how brains process connections, Humin is based on what is called a connection graph which uses data from Facebook, Gmail, LinkedIn and others to gather data on contacts. When a user keys in "lives in New York," for example, a list of everyone from their contacts living in The Big Apple pops up. An update will roll out in the coming weeks that will allow users to associate dates and places to people already in their contacts.
The concept is similar to LinkedIn's Connected app in that Humin is able to provide key information about a user's connection with a contact. But while Connected is designed for professional networking, Humin takes care of both personal and professional contacts, a system that puts people in context.
For those who have a hard time putting names to faces, Humin can help by finding photos of people in a contact list. It still has some kinks to work out but Jain says the app's photo-finding algorithm is being improved so it's only a matter of time before it gets photos right all the time.
Humin will be coming to Android in the following weeks and maybe eventually to Google Glass. Hints have also been dropped that the app is undergoing further development to increase the number of ways Humin can be used, like, say, in cars. At the moment, however, the app is only available in the U.S. A UK launch is coming soon and other markets will follow.
