Calltrunk

» see calltrunk.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

A service that records your own phone calls is a service shaped by whichever country's law you are standing in. Calltrunk sold into the places where one party on a call can consent for everybody on it, which covers the UK and most of the United States, and it argued publicly that the rule was analogous to forwarding an email without asking the sender. That argument has no purchase in Turkey and the product never showed up here. I know it only from the British tech press of the time.

The company was incorporated in London on 9 June 2010 under the unpromising name Consumerage Ltd and became Call Trunk Limited the following May. Paul Murphy and Angela Clarke ran it, with small offices in Dallas and Montreal hanging off the London one. What it did was capture a call from a landline or a mobile, Skype included, and put the audio into an online account that belonged to you rather than to whoever you had been arguing with. Richard Newton, the marketing director, put the case to the BBC in 2013: companies record us, so why shouldn't we record them, and if there is a dispute they hold all the cards.

The clever part was ARGOsearch, a conversation search engine layered on top of the recordings. You could go back through months of stored calls looking for a word or a phrase, which in 2012 was a startling capability to hand somebody holding a phone. It also did not quite work. Background noise and regional accents dragged it down, and the company's own published figure for word indexation accuracy was about eighty percent, which is fine for finding a call again and useless for anything you might want to rely on.

In May 2015 the business was handed to an American company called BetterVoice, which took on the customers and offered a one-click import of their recordings. The service stopped on 8 May.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the register ~

Companies House tells the ending more plainly than the press ever did. There were three companies at the same Hammersmith address, all of them incorporated inside three months of 2010 under the Consumerage name, and all of them renamed in March and May 2011 once somebody settled on the brand. The holding company became Call Trunk Holdings Limited, then renamed itself again on 2 April 2013 to OP3NVOICE LIMITED, after the platform the service was built on.

OP3Nvoice filed its last accounts to 31 December 2014. Winding up commenced on 13 April 2016, a creditors' voluntary liquidation with two insolvency practitioners from Birmingham appointed the same day. Dissolution followed on 26 September 2018. Call Trunk IP Limited had gone before that, dissolved on 30 August 2016. The operating company sat as an empty shell for another six years and was finally dissolved on 11 October 2022, seven years after the last call it recorded.

~ the page that outlived it ~

calltrunk.com is a 114-byte stub now. The real marker is on bettervoice.com, where the migration landing page is still up eleven years later, and still in the present tense: "Important: Calltrunk is shutting down, and we have been working with them to provide an optional migration path for customers and their data." Further down there is a sentence that explains more about how these endings go than any press release would. "Much of the timeline for this transition has been out of our hands."

The Internet Archive brackets the shutdown without quite pinning it. On 15 March 2015 calltrunk.com was still a full product site with pricing and app pages. By 22 September 2015 the whole thing had been reduced to a tagline over a link to the FAQ, under a copyright line reading 2015.

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