Trilight Zone

[tricore]

My first reaction to Jangl, an anonymity proxy service for phone numbers, was is that necessary? But dig a bit deeper and you find out there is value - albeit probably to a specific niche. But as niches go, it's potentially a big one. Jangl creates a unique phone number for any pair of people. It saves you from handing out your real phone number to someone, if you're not ready for that, but allows you to both communicate. Alec Saunders has some more details, garnered from a chat with Tim Johnson and CEO Michael Cerda. The service is being geared towards a dating community, for example.

Consider the mechanics behind generating unique call numbers between pairs of people. If you have, say, 1,000 members in a dating community, how many possible unique pairs of people do you have? C(1000, 2) = 1000-choose-2 combinations = [1000!/ (1000-2)!]/2! = 1000!/ 2x998! = 1000x999/2 = nearly a half-million generated numbers to serve all possible matchups, if I remember my math correctly. Of course, any one person wouldn't have to know all those numbers. But there's a lot of number management behind the scenes. More details to come.