India’s Nimbuzz Plans New Venture Starting with Holaa

Originally posted on TechCrunch:

It's nearly one month since Nimbuzz, the mobile messaging and calling service with 200 million registered users, was bought by UK telecoms company New Call in a $250 million deal. Today we get a glimpse of what's to come after it released its first post-acquisition product: a dialer app for Android called Holaa!.

Holaa (sorry, Nimbuzz, but adding '!' just isn't cool - ask Yahoo) is a free call management app designed to replace the default on your Android phone. To tempt you in, it offers a range of features that go beyond the stock, 'dumb' dialer, most notable of which is spam blocking.

Crowdsourcing Dodgy Numbers

The app lets you identify unwanted callers as spam - a situation that is common in India, where Nimbuzz claimed as many as 40 percent of calls are unwanted. That information is then uploaded to a central server which collects spam-marked numbers from other Holaa users...

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