A Taiwanese Startup Is Gaining Traction in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait

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Got harassed by strange calls? Every time when you see a new number showed on the phone, do you hesitate to answer it? Wouldn’t it be a relief if you get to know who is the caller?

A group of Taiwanese app developers have cracked the solution for this problem. Last year the app caught attention of Google’s Eric Schmidt, who happen to mention about it by chance.

When Jackie Cheng, one of the app developers heard about it, he and his friends decided to quit their day job and start a company called Gogolook. The company is 10 months old and their app has attracted significant traction.

is an app that can identify hundreds of million strange numbers that are stored in their database. The database includes phone number information from Hong Kong, US, Taiwan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and India.

The app claims to to block any call or SMS that the user may not want to receive.

There are 3 different ways to subscribe WhosCall Pro : Monthly Plan – 0.99USD/Month, Annual Plan – 9.99USD/Year, One-time fee – 14.99USD.

Online data showed that the app was gaining the greatest traction in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Also, 60 percent of the users worldwide were women, and in the Middle East the percentage of female users was over 70 percent, the data revealed.

The data led the owners of the lean startup to know the reasons behind this adoption and they started interviewing some of their Facebook page followers from Middle East. The app developers found that many women in Saudi Arabia end up getting calls from unknown numbers. In a country where women are required to wear abaya and cover their faces in public, the chances of them engaging in any public exchanges with the opposite sex are rare, said Chiu, Gogolook’s chief operating officer.

Some Saudi Arabia men would simply look up women’s phone numbers in the Yellow Pages and “just randomly call, or disturb them,” he said. This has led to increased adoption of the app by women who would like to avoid unknown calls.

The company recently signed a partnership deal last September with Heroz Inc., a Japanese mobile social gaming company with more than 20 million users. The Gogolook app currently operates only on the Android platform but will be rolled out soon for Apple’s iOS.

Source: Focustaiwan