Future Dated: October 15, 2017

With the 2013 launch of the Facebook phone, Zuck and crew started a trend of social startups and branded phones. While surprisingly, the Facebook phone has gone on to be the dominant version of the much-splintered Android platform, what was even more surprising was the cacophony of companies joining the fray. Some reasonably successful versions like the Zynga Gaming Phone and the Amazon Smoke phones and the Evernote Watch Phone are far outnumbered by absolute failures like the Groupon Phone, the cobranded Foursquare/Tumblr Phone and our favorite disaster, the Angry Birds Phone.

Today brings us the much talked about and highly anticipated release of the first ever Klout Phone, named the K+. Building on its meteoric rise over the past five years from a highly controversial service to the must-have tool for marketers and connected consumers, what the K+ lacks in cool new looks it more than makes up for in surprisingly tight integration of Klout’s services. 

The K+ brings its own split to the Android line — they seem to have followed the path first trodden by Amazon, which is to bury a stripped-down version of Android in the background and present their own interface over the top. Klout gives you the option of using the Facebook App Store or Google Play. And like the Facebook Phone, all of Klout’s features are broken out on the home screen as their own apps.

Along with the ability to access all of Klout’s stats and notifications, all of the features you’ve come to love in the new Klout app are there:

• Facial recognition so you can take a picture of someone and see their Klout score and relevant social features. 
• Discount/coupon notification for locations offering perks, depending on your score. 
• Notification when your Klout friends are nearby. 
• The ability to alert you when you’re near someone with a high Klout score. 
• Tracking and geospatial comparison of your offline and online influence relationships.

They’ve even integrated their affiliate URL service, but the mobile application of this never made sense to us. Sure, their affiliate service and API were ground-breaking at the time, as it allowed them to extend their revenue far beyond perks, especially when powerhouse services like Pinterest and Bitly integrated their API, but the mobile utility of this just doesn’t work (although we love having access to the stats on our phone).

As with everything Klout does, their newest features are sure to set the critics spewing bile again. But love them or hate them, you have to admire Klout’s ingenuity.

Hardware

The phone is pretty standard fare; in fact the specs are almost identical to the latest Facebook and Amazon phones. But we have heard rumors of a K+ Perks model that will have an illuminated Klout emblem on the back to dynamically update your score. We suspect these will only be offered to people with a certain score.

Mail/Calendar

If you use any of the Klout web browser, Outlook or Gmail extensions, then you’ll love the mobile integration. Emails are prioritized by the sender’s score and for people who don’t have a score you can assign a level of importance to them. When your calendar gets too full on any one day, Klout recommends low-scoring people you could cancel on. Although the “We recommend you blow this meeting off” Pop-up is sure to anger plenty of people — especially if you’re already with the unlucky person when it pops up.

Integration with your normal email settings are automatically applied once you log in, but you can’t do some things on the K+ that you can do online, like set different auto-reply messages or different signatures based on the recipient’s score. However, those are tasks that are probably better done on Klout.kom. 

Phone/Voice Mail

We’ve heard some people still make voice phone calls, if so — and if you love Klout as much as us — then you’ll love their new voice phone integration. You can set up different auto-responses like in email, based on a person’s Klout score, and set up different voice messages for people with different scores. And just like the K+’s email prioritization of inbound messages, you have the ability to set different ring tones for different scores and can even set it to send low-scorers directly to voicemail or even block them completely. This feature alone could finally solve the problem the do-not-call lists have failed to clear up.

Text

This is only a little thing, but we love seeing our friends’ Klout scores next to their incoming text messages. Although we wish they would allow you to set up auto-replies, prioritization and blocking like they do with phone calls and email.

Social Network Integration

You have the option to download separate Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other apps, but we by far prefer Klout’s People app. For Windows Phone users out there this will look familiar to their Klout WP7 app. By opening the People app, you’ll be presented with updates from your friends based on their score. Who wants to see pictures from unimportant people?

Conclusion

If you’re a hater, I think it’s obvious that this is not your phone. Also, if you’re an Apple or Windows fanboy or an Android purist then here’s hoping Klout finds a way to bring more of these services to your platform via their app.

However, if you split your social networking between multiple services and the Facebook Phone isn’t cutting it for you, and if you love Klout, then this is the phone for you. If you’re an Amazon or Evernote power user but are looking for a second (or third) phone to fulfill your social networking addiction then you can’t beat the K+.

Please feel free to comment below — but only if your Klout score is high enough to clear our Klout comment plugin.  

Maybe I’d be happier about this if I actually invested in stocks but to me this just seems sad (ripping off StockTwits) and do most of Twitter’s users even care about stocks? They’re doing anything they can to attract users on the site and advertisers. I guess that’s to be expected. 

Twitter Rolls Out Clickable Stock Symbols, Or Cashtags 

The Twitter Hijacking of Stocktwits $ …The Cashtag

Three years ago, I wrote an open letter to startups; I asked them to please take my money. In that post I mentioned that I would gladly pay for Twitter (remember this was 3 years ago, back when Twitter was still saying it wouldn’t resort to advertising). 

Then last week Dalton Caldwell announced that he (via his startup app.net) is going to build a paid for version of Twitter. It’s ambitious and I don’t know if it’s going to work but he’s crowdfunding the investment capital ($500K) for the project. You can choose to pay $50, $100 or $150 a year for the service. Like all crowdfunded projects you don’t actually pay unless they reach their goal. 

I have yet to do a Kickstarter project but I gladly signed up for this one. 4 days into the fundraising he has $58.5K raised from 847 people averaging $69.07 per person. Most people have obviously opted for the $50 option. At $69.07 per person over a total of 31 days (fundraising stops on Aug 13) app.net will need 233.5 people per day to signup. So far they have only averaged 211 people per day. They’re a little off trajectory but I imagine this isn’t unusual for crowdfunding projects. I imagine they get more momentum near the end. 

It’s an accepted belief that people won’t pay for services on the Internet. This is of course a gross exaggeration. I started looking at all the services I happily pay for:

GigaOm Pro: $299 a year. Best analysis and reports out there. 
Pandora One: $36 a year. Even though I’m in the UK, I VPN into the US at work to listen to my ad free customized radio.  
TunnelBear: $49.99 a year Allows me to VPN into the US from the UK so I can stream videos from Hulu, Netflix (US and UK with one account thank you) and via my Amazon Prime account in the US. 
Flickr Pro: 24.95 a year. I could move all my photos to a free service but, despite their challenges, I still like Flickr.  
LinkedIn Business Plus: I actually use LinkedIn a lot for research on businesses and individuals and the extra search features in Business Plus are very nice. 
NSFW Corp: $3 a month. Just today I signed up for Paul Carr’s new pay only online “magazine”.
Amazon Prime: $79 a year. Even though we don’t currently live in the US we still have our Amazon Prime account. We stream videos and will still order stuff and haven’t sent to our family members houses. This is especially useful for birthdays.  

And if I took the time to go through my credit card history I could probably list a dozen other services I’m not thinking of at the moment. Of course I also don’t have a newspaper subscription or cable TV so this probably offsets most people’s normal subscriptions. 

We’re seeing more and more services starting to offer premium versions or raising funds to get away from advertising, and I’m glad. I wish more would do it.