HOUSTON, Texas, April 2, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via PRWEB - Do you remember the last time you felt annoyed when trying to share your name, email, or street address with a new friend, customer support representative, or business associate?
For Dmitri Dozortsev, MD, PhD, the problem was confounded by his rather thick accent.
The Eureka moment, that lead to General Number's concept, arrived when he was paying with a credit card over the phone. He realized that digits, unlike letters, sound unambiguous and can be easily related by voice without errors. He also reasoned that since the recipient is entering his information into a computer anyway, why not have a system where only the number has to be related by voice, while the rest of the information travels directly between the sender's and receiver's devices?
The leap from an idea to the product was helped by Dr. Dozortsev's prior experience in Internet technology. When his computer was hacked and Norton Antivirus failed to solve the problem, he invented what later became pcInternet Patrol (pcIP), the world's first cloud-based, real-time personal application firewall, which was acquired by PCtools, Inc. Ironically, the maker of Norton Antivirus, Symantec Inc, now owns Dr. Dozortsev's pcIP patent, referenced as a prior art in patents of Microsoft, IBM, Fujitsu, and a couple dozen other large companies.
After going through several prototypes and about a year in development, the first generation of General Number (GN) is now complete and an application is available for both iPhone and Android devices.
To share information, the sending user taps an icon on the GN application and a disposable eight digit number is generated. This number is spoken to the receiving party. Once the number is entered by the receiver into her (his) device, the sender receives a request to share contact information. At that time, the sender chooses what information will be shared and taps the "send" button. This enables easy, fast, and accurate contact information exchange with anyone who has Internet access, including those without the GN application.
GN for individuals is free and private by design: it requires neither an account nor registration of any form and there is no cloud storage of the user's information. The user has complete control over what information is being shared during each transaction.
Making it unnecessary to create an account and register gives GN another important advantage over any other system, where both the sender and the recipient have to first create an account on the same network (i.e. Skype) before they can send information to each other. With GN, the recipient only needs a number and a web browser. This can be very handy when a user needs to share information with customer support, road side assistance, or emergency services without becoming a contact first.
Since the number can be easily captured from any medium, including billboards, websites, TV, radio, printed material or word of mouth, businesses and professionals will find GN's micro-website to be the simplest and the most efficient way to share their publicly available information .
This micro-website is assigned a permanent number and a word (similar to an IP address and a domain name) chosen by the account holder. It encapsulates all contact information, including name, email address, web site address, street address, hours of operation, and links to social media pages.
Once users capture a business's micro-website into their smart phone, they become that business's follower. Unlike following a business on Twitter or Facebook, GN users remain completely anonymous and only receive promotions and announcements at their discretion on demand.
The second generation of GN, currently in the pipeline, enables sending files, pictures, and payment, without exchanging contact information first.
With the addition of Bill Fogarty, a seasoned marketing expert who built Houston's largest advertisement agency, and Nicholas Rockecharlie, an investment banker, GN is on its way to create a new household name.
This article was originally distributed on PRWeb. For the original version including any supplementary images or video, visit http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/03/prweb12599858.htm