
South Korea's largest mobile carrier SK Telecom said Monday that the number of subscribers to its T-Phone, the world’s first integrated dialer platform launched in February last year, had broken the 7 million mark.
Over 85 percent of SKT’s smartphone users are using the T-Phone service offering various communication features that combine voice calls and data services. The T-Phone service is now being used over 66 million times a day.
Recently, SKT has been working on the expansion of the T-Phone platform by opening up its call-related APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to external apps, such as Zigbang (a real estate rent searching app) and Baedaltong (a food delivery app).
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In May, Zigbang and Baedaltong became available on the T-Phone platform. Thus, when a T Phone subscriber calls a realtor or a food delivery service provider directly from the mobile apps upon finding an attractive apartment or a yummy menu, the realtor or the food delivery service provider learn which apartment or menu the caller is viewing as the information will appear on the mobile screen when receiving an incoming call.
T Phone also comes with Safe Call, a feature that lets users screen their calls and alerts them to potential fraud. This service uses crowd-sourcing—reports from their users—along with information from public databases to detect unsolicited sales or marketing calls. The phone numbers that most users blocked will be labelled as ‘Likely to be spam’ while those reported as belonging to telephone scammers will be labeled as ‘Likely to be dangerous’ to warn customers.