DingDong Lets You Know What's Around

Imagine this: You're running late to an important meeting because you're stuck in traffic. Maybe you'll be five minutes late, or maybe a half hour. You're scrambling to find the contact information to alert the secretary of this change. It's a nightmare.

Enter, Ding Dong, a new iPhone app, that has many functions that utilizes the iPhone's location-based technologies, including alerting someone that you'll be late, telling someone that you've arrived for an appointment, asking for a location, or letting people know where you are. You can send your location to someone with a simple click of a button.

Founded in early 2012, and officially launched in June, Ding Dong's co-founder and CEO Onno Faber, 28, says, "We felt that it didn't make sense to type messages or call just to say simple things like where you are."

So, Faber, along with co-founders Jorn van Dijk and Leonard van Driel, created Ding Dong, a self-funded company based in the Netherlands.

However, these peripatetic co-founders, all Dutch, are currently in Berlin, because, as Faber says, "We have a world-wide market, and we love to be around great startup scenes such as in Silicon Valley and Berlin. Travel keeps us sharp and we are meeting lots of other interesting people, which is what it is all about."

He adds, "We love to talk with our users about their experience and how they use the app. We've encountered many real-life situations from users and ourselves, which made us better understand the value of Ding Dong. For example, when Ding Donging some friends from a favorite coffee bar, they actually showed up to co-work there."

A centerpiece feature is the app's user friendly Ding Dong button, of which Faber says, "In the end we want to step over the limitations of mobile messaging, and love to replace the tiny keyboard with one beautiful button."

Another Ding Dong success story involves a lost iPhone:  The guy who found the iPhone saw an incoming Ding Dong, and drove the phone to the displayed location, recognized the face and returned it.

Ding Dong seeks to resolve many of the criticisms of contemporary app functionality. Faber says, "It takes so many steps to simply send a photo to someone, so we end up not sending one at all. It's not about what you can do with an app, it's about you actually doing it."