CallTrack: Android App That Can Help Capture Billables
If you’re like me (and I hope you’re not), you are really sick to death of the breathless iPad coverage. So, have some Android coverage instead. From our buds at Gizmodo and Gizmodo’s older, far more responsible sister, Lifehacker, comes news of an absolutely brilliant Android app called CallTrack. This app, as the name implies, tracks calls. Duh. But the brilliance isn’t what it does, but how it does it.
An Android phone is, well, a phone. With a calendar. Specifically, with Google Calendar. And while you have a call log built into the phone, CallTrack takes that data and exports it to Google Calendar. From the standpoint of someone who needs to track his time to bill clients, that is nothing short of amazing. There is a somewhat kludgy SQL program I use for billing and case management that allegedly has some dialer and this feature and yada-yada-yada. But if I want to make a phone call, I don’t want to open some ugly, kludgy program.
If this program is what it says it is – an under-the-hood app that automatically exports your call data to your calendaring program – it could be a godsend to every person who depends on capturing time for billing purposes. Time is money. The worst part of capturing time is the time spent capturing it. Moreover, this is a sort of “Google For The Rest Of Us”. Take disparate data points and use it across platforms to form new data. Moreover, this is something that should have been done before. My iPhone, like an Android phone, has a call log and a calendar. Log the call data on the calendar. Or at least give me an option to do so.
If you want to get a foothold into the extremely lucrative business sector, offer features that appeal to business. Like the ability to capture time with a minimum of effort.
