SOURCE: reQall

 

HYDERABAD, INDIA--(Marketwire - September 4, 2008) - Fans of the new iPhone can now forget about forgetting thanks to a new memory product made in India. reQall (www.reQall.com) is bringing its award-winning memory aid that has been such a hit in the US and Europe to Indian consumers. Any owner of the new iPhone or iPod Touch can now download reQall's application for free from Apple's App Store and use it to better organize schedules, to-do lists and reminders.

Launching the application in their home country, India, is particularly rewarding for reQall's founding team of Rao Machiraju, Sunil Vemuri and Ash Vasudevan, as it comes on the heels of a wildly-successful international debut. "Our development team in Hyderabad helped build a product that has been praised from the BBC to the New York Times," said CEO Machiraju. "Now we're bringing reQall home."

"reQall is based on groundbreaking research from the world-famous MIT Media Lab in the US and developed in Hyderabad under the guidance of one of the best executive and advisory teams in the technology industry," adds co-founder Ash Vasudevan.

Here's how it works: reQall lets users record reminders by speaking into their phone. It converts these reminders into text, which are delivered back precisely at the right time. The product can prompt users via text message, instant message, email or as a calendar alert. It also recognises the keyword "buy" and automatically adds the entry to a shopping list or agenda. reQall automatically recognises dates and times, so if you say "remind me to use my airmiles before May 18," a reminder is inserted in your calendar. If you use the word "meet" reQall will automatically schedule a meeting. You can even use your iPhone to remind your friends or family members by saying things like "ask Jenny to get the car washed." Jenny will then immediately receive a reminder from you by text, email or instant message. You can even take pictures using your iPhone and store these within reQall, so you can remember things that you can't easily describe.

reQall user Jon Kim explained: "All my life, I have suffered from very severe Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. In no way did reQall erase my disorder, but it did the next best thing by giving me the most efficient memory aid that no paper and ink, nor any other voice recorder or other device, could have ever offered me. I've been using this program for ten days now, and I refuse to be without it."

About reQall

Dr. Machiraju is a long-time Apple employee who in 2004 joined two fellow expats to form a global company with strong Indian roots. reQall's three founders all hold Ph.D. degrees and have pooled their global high-tech experience for this digital memory aid. Co-founder Sunil Vemuri earned his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he conducted pioneering research into human memory assistance, information retrieval and visualisation, speech recognition and interface design. Like co-founder Dr. Machiraju, he worked at Apple Computer before focusing on Hyderabad's potential as an ideal incubator for new IT ideas. Ash Vasudevan, the third co-founder, is a Founding General Partner of high-profile Venture Fund with strong Indian connections and activities, having recently backed the Sports Talent Hunt Content and TV series "The Million Dollar Arm."

reQall today employs 34 people in Hyderabad, plus additional staff in Silicon Valley's NASA Research Park and in Hong Kong. The flagship product for the iPhone was launched earlier this year in the US, Canada and the UK. It won universal praise and several innovation awards.

What sets reQall apart from other memory-related software, according to industry watchers, is the company's team of advisers. Computer veteran Gordon Bell is a Microsoft senior researcher who heads the software giant's effort at life-logging. It is a novel way to capture, organize and retrieve an entire life's worth of data. reQall also draws on the advice of Don Norman, a former manager of Apple's Advanced Technology Group and professor of cognitive science and psychology. Norman has written seminal books on intuitive design and the future of human-machine interaction -- both valuable insights when the task is to jog people's memory without startling or confusing them.