For myself and almost everyone I know the mobile phone is the definitive buddy list, so this is an excellent idea.

Once you've gathered information about who people contact and how often what will you do with it?

Great idea, with one serious problem though. Xobni data are useful mostly to infer social relationships. You can get the data you need only for smartphones, which are small proportion of all phones. Social data are useful if you don't have big inherent holes in that social graph.

So you need to target smartphones and can't use the social network effect. But you can still add big value to the phone's owner.

make it web based and target all web enabled devices. At least that way your not going to limited by device memory.

Thanks Darren. I missed this out completely. I was only targeting smart phones. Although I would still build the software for smart phones, I think I should provide a web interface for the rest. What say?

yeah sounds like a viable plan. If you develop it using an mvc design then it should be fairly easy to make it online as well.

just curious, but what makes you think xobni will not be offering the feature soon, and if they will what makes you think that yours will have an advantage to theirs, knowing they are already ahead, have users, and done a good job executing it and will probably offer the services faster than you can!!!

You'll never start a startup with that attitude. ;-)

Everyone needs critics, it helps create drive. IMO.

Devils advocate or not, it's like saying you should only seek out opportunities that have no competition.

not really, it is like trying to realize there are some capable companies out there that could have some big advantages over you and trying to find solutions on how you will compete with them if they decide to do the same thing, instead of just being optimistic that it will never happen

i still don't really get xobni :-\

What's up there. I have a mobile app that mines your phone and sends it to the server. it is up, and runnning and I have 1 corporate client. what is a good way to contact you?

nice. you can mail me at mellampudi at gmail dot com