Hoiio Blog » Dave

Hoiio Live launching at Demo Spring 2012, Santa Clara CA

Dave — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:36:07 +0000

Exciting news for everyone!

We will be at Demo Spring, Santa Clara CA on April 18-19th to launch our latest product “Hoiio Live” an application that breathes life into your phonebook!

This is what Hoiio Live is all about in one sentence – live discovery, live updates and live syncing to all your devices!

Customize Your Card and Say Something with the New Hoiio Live Update!

Dave — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 06:17:33 +0000

Your Card represents who you are and that’s why Hoiio Live now lets you customize it! Use your company logo, your own photo, or even something abstract. Get creative!

But that’s not all that’s new with Hoiio Live!

Are your connection requests being rejected? Then make sure you introduce yourself first! Refresh the memory of your old acquaintances or convince a new contact to connect with you. Those receiving your connection requests will see your short message on their notifications.

Likewise, should you decide to reject a connection request, Hoiio Live lets you say something back.

Get Hoiio Live or update your version now to use these new features.

Want new features on Hoiio Live? Let us know!

Reinventing the Way Phonebooks are Managed

Dave — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 03:53:23 +0000

When the telephone was first conceptualized in the early 1800’s, it enjoyed the same success as that of facebook today. While it is hard to come across someone without a facebook account, it is evidently harder to come across those who do not own a phone. Aware that keeping track of phone numbers is a necessity rather than luxury, people invented the first Telephone Directory in the late 1870’s. For more than a century, people are happy to keep track of them with papers and pens. Anyone born in the 1980’s would still remember of how cool phones are when it comes with the card where you can write phone numbers to. No longer will you have to flip between the pages of your personal phonebook. In those days, this feature was almost Buddhistic in philosophy—“one with the phone.”

The advent of Nokia and the throngs of phones that come rallying behind the Finnish giant pioneered the next great leap—merging one’s personal phonebook with his cellphone electronically. Gone were the days when people would dig into the pages of his phonebook. When in need of contact information, people flash out their cellphones and bam! There it pops out.

With Hoiio Live, we are taking this development in a grander scale.

For almost 150 years, everyone bears the burden of keeping track with his friends’ contact information. If someone switches number, there is an unspoken rule that every one of his friends should know. Thus, he will have to spend time informing everyone of what has been changed. Anyone who has changed his phone number knows the agony one has to go through in texting all who are worthy enough to get informed. More often than not, some others are skipped, intentionally. Further, there are often doubts that people whom you have not contacted for a long time would still hold the same number.

Here at Hoiio, we think that updating phonebook should be done by the person in the entry, not by the one who has the entry. This means that if I change my number, I should be the one updating the phonebook of all my friends, rather than telling them to update their phonebook with my new info.

A simple look at this reveals one thing: Hoiio is revolutionizing the way one treats his phonebook contacts… and we created Hoiio Live to do just that. With Hoiio Live, you only manage your own Contact Information. All changes you make will trickle down to your friends’ phonebook… and all the changes they make in theirs will trickle down to yours. This means that you no longer have to “stay updated” because you are now “always updated.”

Here’s a short video to help you jumpstart your experience with Hoiio Live.

Hoiio Live is free for grabs worldwide in the Apple App Store and will soon be available on Android as well. For more information, visit http://live.hoiio.com

2012: Here we come!

Dave — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 06:18:33 +0000

New Year always gives new hope, new beginning, new aspirations, new challenges to overcome and more dreams to fulfil. At Hoiio, we are always grateful and inspired by all your suggestions, feedback and even criticisms which help and push us to meet the demands of our ever growing users. Our commitment to give our users a WOW experience has always been our top priority. We are highly motivated to give our users more exciting and useful features and innovations.

As year 2012 is fast approaching, let us give you a sneak peek of some of the things to look forward to with Hoiio.

Hoiio Live. The app that will make your phone book comes alive. Without a hassle, you will get the most updated contact details of your friends and business partners.
More Hoiio Numbers in other countries. Now we sell Singapore and HK numbers. We will add our inventories from other countries like Australia, etc.
Hoiio Business for everyone: easily create a Hoiio Business account and get your office mates to benefit from Hoiio.
More apps to increase your productivity in the office.

These are just 4 of Hoiio’s long list of things we are working on. More innovations and technologies await you as we share another year together and more fruitful years to come.

Cheers to 2012!

Hoiio Team

2011: Thank You!

Dave — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 06:18:17 +0000

As we celebrate this joyous season and as we prepare for the coming year, this is the best time to look back and be thankful for the fruitful year of partnership with you. With this, allow us to share some of the things we have done and accomplished throughout the year. All of these may have not been possible without your honest feedback, helpful suggestions and most of all, your unwavering support.

Launched new products: Hoiio Chat, Hoiio API, and Hoiio Genie.
Slashed Call/SMS rates, thus offering the cheapest rates in the market today.
Improved Internet call experience on Android.
Provided Top Up receipt, you can ask reimbursement from your company.
Extended communication channel with you via Facebook , Twitter, and suggestion box.
First born app from the Hoiio API program, named Textuate co-created by the good folks from SmartLoans.
Awarded as one of the Top 50 Applications in Asia. Thanks to you! :)

Again, we want to extend our heartfelt gratitude for sharing all these milestones with us and we look forward to serving you for many years to come.

Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year!

Cheers!
Hoiio

Hoiio Phone v.2.2 for Android – New Internet Call for the New Year

Dave — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 07:22:24 +0000

A little over a year ago, Hoiio introduced Internet Call (Beta), a cheaper alternative to call friends and loved ones through the use of VOIP technology. Since then, we have logged more than 300,000 minutes of internet calls! This is absolutely encouraging to us and we’d like to extend our deepest gratitude to our customers for making this possible. This year, we’ve decided to put more icing to the cake and we are excited to share with you what we have been doing for the past few months to enhance your internet call experience.

1. New Year, New Look!

Charles Lamb once said that New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday. We think that it is also true for Hoiio! In this new release, we’ve given the Internet Call module a facelift. We’ve also added a new feature in this screen where the quality of your call is measured real time.

2. New Year, New Upgrade

In using the new Internet Call, you will immediately notice the improvement from the old one. We have updated some modules to reduce the amount of outside noise during a conversation. You will also notice a significant improvement in the voice quality.

3. New Year, New Feature

We do not want to charge you for something you won’t enjoy. And so prior to starting an Internet Call, we do a quick check of your network connection to see if it is good enough to initiate an Internet call.

Hoiio Phone v2.2 for Android is now available in the Android Market. If you haven’t done so, now’s a good time to download the app!

Oh! And did we mention that we’ll be very happy to interact with you and know what you think? Come and join our Facebook page!

Cheers!
Hoiio Team

Local calls shouldn’t be expensive

Dave — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:48:15 +0000

Have you ever realized that you’re actually paying more than your monthly subscription plan from your telco?

Your plan may have some free outgoing call minutes, but once those are used up telco generally charges $0.16/min for your calls.

We’ve got some tips for you:

1. Downgrade to the lowest possible plan
2. Use Hoiio after your free minutes are consumed with your telco or whenever you want to.

How Hoiio callback works?

Hoiio Phone v2.1 for Android – Faster. Better. Calling Could Not Have Been Easier!

Dave — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 02:54:11 +0000

Here at Hoiio, we are committed in delivering powerful applications that revolutionize the way phones are used. In this new release, we have made many improvements to our Android app.

If you are interested to know what those improvements are, read on.
Otherwise,

or search for Hoiio Phone in the Android Market

1. Improved Internet Call

We have updated our Internet Call feature to be more robust, allowing a more engaging / care-free conversation. Simply connect your phone to WiFi or 3G and dial away. Singapore to Hong Kong calls is just SGD 0.029/minute. Singapore to Singapore calls is even cheaper at SGD 0.019/minute! For a Smarter Hello, Use Hoiio!

2. Improved In-app Phonebook Data Synchronization

In v2.0, we designed an in-app data synchronization. It has come to our attention that some of our users have been experiencing some problems with this feature… and so we made sure to address this issue.

In v2.1, data synchronization now happens instantly! If you are among those who ran into this problem, you will surely like this new update. We’ve made it such that even for a phone with thousands of contacts, not only won’t you feel the weight of loading… you don’t even have to wait for loading.

3. Increased SMS Limit from 160 to 450 Characters

Our team also have a lot of great things for you in our SMS module. For those who needs to send an SMS message with more than 160 characters, we upgraded our app to increase the capacity to 450 characters. Oh, did I mention that Singapore to Philippine SMS is just 1 peso/SMS (SGD 0.03)? That’s International SMS for the price of local.

4. Resend SMS

Further, we’ve added a Resend option for SMS. In cases where you need to resend an entire SMS such as greetings and reminders, you don’t need to key in everything once more. Just select which SMS you want to resend and you’re good to go.

5. SMSes Sent via Hoiio Now Appears on Native SMS App

In v2.1, all messages sent via Hoiio is now reflected in your native SMS app. This will help you keep track of all the SMS messages you sent.

6. Home Screen Shortcuts

Finally, we thought that Home Screen shortcuts are valuable to you. In v.2.0, in order to send SMS, you need to go inside the app. Now, you can do it faster by setting up this shortcut. Simply click Menu > Shortcuts > Hoiio – New SMS.

What are you waiting for?

Cheers!

Happy Hari Raya

Dave — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 07:33:42 +0000

Dear Hoiio Friends,

Happy Hari Raya. Send a Hari Raya greeting to your family and friends in Indonesia. At only SGD 8.8 cents/SMS, you can save up to 45% when you send SMS to Indonesia using Hoiio.

With our new SMS partner, we are able to deliver SMS to Indonesia more reliably.
“Like” us on Facebook to interact with us or to show that you like what we are doing :).

Have a blessed holiday,
Team Hoiio

SG 6.8 cents/min to Vietnam!

Dave — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 05:35:24 +0000

Hoiio will be offering calls to Vietnam at 6.8cents/min! With $10, you can talk for 147 mins now.

Features

Topup using Internet Banking, PayPal and Credit Card
No need to enter any pin or code with Hoiio app, just dial +
Trigger call from mobile phone app and web
Customer hotline support available
$0.50 bonus credits to try upon sign up
Call log available online
Access numbers available for none smartphone users too
Call Back Number: +6565918888
Call Through Number: +6565918870

So hurry and register with us now at www.hoiio.com. Remember to share this great news with your family and friends too.

Questions? Contact support@hoiio.com or visit help.hoiio.com for help

*Offer ends 31st Oct 2011
*Charges are in per min block
*Applicable for Singapore users only