We don't see the point: City ID on your phone

We’re all for seeing more information where more information is available. Who wants less information? Suckers, that’s who. But, at the same time, we like this information to be somehow relevant to what we do. Yeah, we wish we had more articles e-mailed to us. That’s good for us, because it gives us information to pass along to you. That’s good for you, because you’re always in the know. However, if the articles sent to us were about, say, local banking, we wouldn’t want it; it’s just not relevant. Cequint, a Seattle startup, is founded upon providing enhanced caller ID. That’s nice, right? It would be cool if the caller ID on your cell phone worked like the caller ID box that you have (or used to have) in your home. It would display the name and number of the person calling. Unfortunately, this is not Cequint’s plan. Instead, they want to provide you with the city from which the caller is calling. So when you see a 212 number on your phone, it will say “New York.” Yipee. Where do I sign up? Apologies for the sarcasm. It’s just that we don’t see why that’s relevant information. The only reason we see it being helpful is because of all the new area codes added for cell phones. You may not recognize an area code that’s calling, and therefore wouldn’t know from where the caller is calling. But why do you need to know? “Oh, it’s a call from North Dakota. Not picking that one up.” No one we know would need the city to make that kind of decision. In our experience, there are two types of cell users: the kind that picks up every call, no matter what the number, and the kind that let unknown numbers go to voice mail. We don’t see this service providing anything that would let people better discern what to do. Now, if they’re working towards a caller ID system that displays the callers information whether they’re in your address book or not, we can climb on board that. But we don’t see the relevance of this service. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]]]>