Burner for iOS Gets Significant Upgrade and Now Free to Download 

Los Angeles, CA – April 10, 2013 -- Burner, the mobile privacy app by Ad Hoc Labs, is now available on Android in the Google Play Store and is now free for download on both Android and iOS. The Burner app puts users in control of their mobile identity and is the first step toward solving the growing problem of mobile privacy.

Burner has also made significant upgrades to its iOS app. New features include: customizable voicemail greetings; the ability to manage call history by starring, renaming or hiding conversations; improved notifications of in-bound calls, missed calls and voicemails; and other enhancements. In addition, consumers can now refer Burner to friends to earn credits for their account.

“We’re really excited to launch Burner for Android. Android is a huge market opportunity for us, and along with making Burner for iOS free, is a key step in making Burner available to everyone,” said Greg Cohn, CEO Ad Hoc Labs. “As privacy is becoming an increasingly hot issue in the mobile space, Burner is an important tool for users to protect themselves by adding an extra layer of anonymity to their phones.”

Burner enables users to obtain disposable numbers for voice and SMS communication. A user can have as many numbers as he or she wants, use each as a private line on iPhone or Android, and “burn” the number whenever he or she is done. Named one of Time Magazine’s Top 10 Apps of 2012, Burner is beneficial as a privacy layer in many situations, from posting contact information on social media, facilitating transactions on classified sites, online dating, professional use by teachers, doctors and lawyers, and more.

“Burner provides that extra layer of security people wish they had when meeting and dealing with strangers on the Internet,” said Burner user Josh R., a 30-year-old chef from Houston, TX, who has found the app especially useful for posting on Craigslist. “It’s so nice and convenient to sever the connection from annoying people who hold on to and misuse your number even after a posting is long gone.”

Jeffrey Z., a teacher from Danbury, CT, uses Burner to create a buffer between himself and his students when he offers his contact information, saying, “I would not want students to have my personal phone number for any reason—I think we all know how teenagers can be.”

Once a user downloads the free iOS or Android app, he or she can create a "Sample Burner" for free. Additional numbers can be purchased via credit packages starting at $1.99. There are also extension options available for purchase.

About Ad Hoc Labs, Inc. 

Ad Hoc Labs is a mobile software company focused on creating tools to give consumers tighter control of their personal information and empower them to make smarter decisions about privacy. The company was founded by Greg Cohn (formerly of Yahoo! and several prior startups) and Will Carter (formerly of Nokia, and whose previous efforts include several early and innovative mobile and location apps). Ad Hoc Labs is located in Los Angeles, CA and is part of a burgeoning movement of startups working on mobile privacy awareness and solutions for consumers.

#### 

Burner for Android: http://brnr.me/play

Burner for iPhone: http://brnr.me/ios 

More Info: http://burnerapp.com

Media Contacts:

Jennifer Stephens Acree

310-780-3331

jennifer@jsastrategies.com

or

Meghan Parrish

310-463-3704

meghan@jsastrategies.com  

When we created Burner we didn’t just want to provide phone numbers, we wanted to create a tool to give consumers more control over their personal information. Today we are very excited to share some big news as we help make mobile privacy more attainable for consumers and move Burner closer to being available for everyone.   

To start, we have one word for you: Android. Today we have officially launched in the Google Play™ Store and ecstatic only begins to describe our feelings! Before we dive into the details, we’d like to give a big thanks to all of you Androiders. We know you’ve been asking and patiently waiting, and we think it was definitely worth the wait.

Isn’t she beautiful? Burner for Android gives you all the same great features you need to take control of your mobile number, whether you’re using it for business, Craigslist or giving out on Friday night at the bar. Every download comes with a sample Burner, on the house. You can send and receive texts, calls and voicemails, in addition to having complete control over your ringers and notifications, for those times you need to be in super stealth mode.  

Our team has been working their butts off to bring you the best Burner possible, not just on Android, but on iOS as well.  We released our latest update today in the App Store and it’s full of enhancements in the app and under the hood. If you haven’t had the opportunity yet, check out all the new features including customizable voicemail greetings, the ability to manage your call history and, of course, the referral program.

Speaking of referral program, have you invited your friends yet? We’ve made it super easy to share your code directly from the app to email, text, Facebook and Twitter. All Burner users, on iOS and Android, have a unique referral code that can be used by friends when they create their Burner account. Every time a friend uses your code you’ll both earn free credits.

In an effort to make Burner even more accessible to everyone interested in adding a little anonymity to their mobile number, we would also like to announce that Burner is now free to download on iOS and Android! If you’ve been waiting to download, there’s never been a better cheaper time to get in on all the exciting Burner action. It should make getting all your friends to use your referral code easier too!

We hope you enjoy all the exciting new stuff. Stay tuned for more new features coming soon!

Want to write about this release? Check out our press release.

Want to stay in touch? Connect with us on Twitter and Facebook.

Only fools use their real number. Burner's got your back for all your prank calls or texts today. 

Tweet us your best pranks #burnerfools and the 10 best get free Burner credits.

This new version of Burner is hot! We’re very excited to share with you our new referral program and a ton of sizzling new features!

Burner Referral Program

Once you update, you'll see a new "Refer Friends" button where you'll find your referral code. We've made it easy to send invitations directly to your friends via text or email, or share to Facebook and Twitter. It's simple: every time one of your friends signs up using your code, you’ll both see extra credits added to your account.

To kick off the referral program, we've made Burner free for a limited time! Not only will your friends get free credits for using your referral code, they'll also receive one sample burner on us. So, start sending those invites -- we promise your friends will thank you!

Other Features and Improvements

You can now record your own custom voicemail greeting. The custom greeting is specific to each burner, so you can record a custom greeting for the burner you use for business and keep the standard anonymous message for the other burners you use for play...or maybe the other way around.

Thanks to your feedback, you can say goodbye to burned numbers based on usage. Now when you use all your minutes or SMS, the number will be disabled and can be refilled any time until the expiration date.

There are interface enhancements throughout the app and improved notifications for calls and voicemails.

We've also added the ability to better manage your call history by starring, renaming and marking as read. This is one of our favorite new features and it really comes in handy when you have a lot of incoming activity.

Phew, that was a lot and this is just the tip of the iceberg! Be on the look out for more awesomeness coming very soon!

Love the changes? Let us know on Facebook and Twitter.

We are very excited to be nominated by the Los Angeles Venture Association for this year's 10th annunal LAVA awards. Ad Hoc Labs has been nominated for the Hottest First Round Funding award, alongside other local startups SurfAir and PageWoo.

LAVA is Los Angeles’s premiere Venture Capital focused industry organization that provides a forum for Entrepreneurs, Investors and the community of businesses that assist companies in their formation and growth. LAVA celebrates 28 years of service to the community. It is led by a team of volunteers that provide program, sponsorship and leadership in the Venture funded community. For more information, visit www.lava.org.

The awards dinner is this Wednesday and we'll let you know how it goes! 

Meet Jake. Jake's great. You may have heard the story about how him and his friends recovered his stolen bike.

The short version starts when some jerk stole his bike in Portland. Then, he found the guy trying to sell his bike on Craigslist in Seattle. Jake used Burner to make himself look like a Seattleite interested in buying the bike and set up a sting to catch the thief. You can read about the longer version, but unfortunately the thief's attorney had the video of the sting removed, so you can't watch the whole eight minutes of awesomeness anymore; terrible I know!

But Jake has used Burner to find more than bikes, most recently he used it to find love. 

Jake, now an arborist, enjoys spending his free time in the parks and wooded areas near Portland, identifying various species of plants and bugs. On one of his many adventures he met a lovely lady who shared his love of trees and bugs, specifically slugs, so he asked for her number. He really liked her and wanted to do something special for her, and the Slug Fact Line was born.

Every day or so, he would text her from his burner a new fact about slugs. She loved it and knows its him, but after dating for eight months now, he still hasn't admitted to being the man behind the texts. Romantic, isn't it?

Do you have any cute Burner stories? Let us know in the comments!

Since I introduced myself a couple months ago, I've heard testimonies of great experiences people have had using Burner to sell odds and ends on Craigslist. I haven't sold anything yet, but I've purchased a number of items. I was honestly surprised by how liberating the experience was, knowing that at any point I could remove myself from this stranger's world -- burn, poof, gone.

In my years of buying and selling on Craigslist, I disregarded the importance of my privacy or security in dealing with people, despite the horror stories you can find with a simple Google search. I liken this experience to eating healthier and the feelings you experience after doing so. You don't realize that you have a problem until you make a change and start feeling better, and my Burner experience was similar. I somehow felt better about haggling over price a bit more than usual and more confident in meeting this stranger to complete our transaction. I also can't imagine going back; the idea of giving someone on Craigslist my real number makes me cringe. 

I honestly can't wait to have something I need to sell, but admittedly that could have less to do with Burner and more to do the fact that I'm hoping the Textastrophe guy will see my ad and make me laugh, which I promise would be another blog post. :)

Have you had a great experience using Burner? I really want to hear it, really! Email me, or catch me on our Facebook and Twitter.

Burn on!

Last week we unveiled our new URL scheme and this week we are thrilled to share that we are now officially supported by Launch Center Pro. We are big fans of this app which makes it even more exciting. 

So what is Launch Center Pro? Exactly what it sounds like; a launcher for your iPhone. It utilizes URL schemes to create quick shortcuts to specific features buried within apps. 

So what can you do with Burner in Launch Center Pro? When you create an 'action' in Launch Cetner Pro, you'll see a list of options which include launching Burner, creating a new burner, view all conversations for all burners or a single burner, and texting or calling from a burner. 

For our tech savvy users, there's all kinds of nifty things you can do with URL schemes, but Launch Center Pro makes it simple for me everyone else! Enjoy!

This week we heard from 'Jane'. Jane is recently back on the dating scene and being more cautious this time around. Before Burner if she wasn't 110% certain the man she was talking to was primo dating material there was no way he was getting her number. 

Her solution to the awkwardness of trying to avoid giving him her number? Give the guy her ex's number. Not the route I would have gone, but hey, I'm not here to judge. 

Enter Burner and everyone wins. No awkwardness for Jane and maybe she won't miss out on that great guy that just made a bad first impression. No more phone calls from strange men for her ex. And another great story for the Burner logs.

Want to share your Burner story? We want to hear from you anytime on Facebook, Twitter, or send us an email by visiting support.burnerapp.com.

Burn on!

When we released version 1.4 of Burner last week, we included a hidden but powerful new feature.  Developers can now use our Burner URL scheme to create phone numbers, access an existing number, call or sms from a known number, or simply deep link to a Burner's detail page from their own iOS or mobile apps.

Integrating Burner functionality into an existing app is trivial.  We have written and documented a full end-to-end example which you can check out here .  This sample app allows users the ability to check into a location on Foursquare and append a Burner number to the check-in.  Once checked-in, the app allows the user to place calls or send sms messages with that number, or view that number's details.

To grab a number from Burner, simply open the following url:

burner://create

to create a new burner number to use.  You can also pass a [areacode] or [name] parameter to the url to specify those details for the Burner number.

or

burner://choose

to choose an existing number. You'll probably want to pass in a [redirect] parameter like

burner://choose?redirect=[url]

In this scenario, you'd open the burner URL like so:

NSString *url = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"burner://choose?redirect=%@", @"your_app_url_scheme"];
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:url]];

After grabbing a number, Burner will redirect back to your app with the number in the "burner" param: 

your_app_url_scheme://something?burner=13238675309

which you can parse out, store, or really do anything with.  You can even initiate a phone call or an sms message with the Burner number by doing something like

NSString *sms_url = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"burner://sms?burner=%@", @"13238675309"];
NSString *call_url = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"burner://sms?burner=%@", @"13238675309"];
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:call_url]];

That's it!  Easy, right?  Check out BurnSquare on github for implementation details and sample code and keep watching this space for more Burner integration tips and tricks in the future.

Congratulations we all survived 2012 and another holiday season. We are so excited for what 2013 has in store for Burner and what we have in store for you. 

Before we look forward to next year we want to share some of our most exciting moments of 2012.

1. Our launch is #1, duh! Burner was born and man was it a ride. We received so much community support and made it into the top 10 utility apps in the App Store in our first. 
2. Funding is a close #2! Not only does this mean we can bring you exciting new features (and yes Android too) in 2013, but we've had the opportunity to work with some pretty amazing people. 
3. You noticed us! The end of the year always means the top of everything roundups. Here's some highlights and lists we've been featured in:

TIME Top 10 Apps of 2012

The Next Web 35 Best Productivity Apps of 2012

Complex Top 50 Apps of 2012

Gizmag Best iPhone Apps of 2012

Now onto 2013, and this year is all about you! We are brining you a new platform, new features, new giveaways and as usual new numbers!

Be sure to stay in contact on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with everything that's happening with Burner. Remember we always want to hear from you! You can also visit support.burnerapp.com any time to send us your suggestions and feedback.

We hope you have a fun and safe New Year's Eve, and be sure to have your Burners ready for your party tonight! 

As you may know, the Burner team is working hard to bring you some very exciting things in 2013 *cough*Android*cough*. In the meantime, we’ve just released an update in the App Store for our current users that is now available for download. 

So what’s new in Burner 1.4?

- Ability to edit Burner names

We’ve heard from the community that you’d like the ability to better organize your Burner list. Did you think you were going to use a particular Burner for a dating site and now you’re using it to sell your car on Craigslist? No problem! We made it super easy to edit Burner names as often as you’d like.

- Added URL Scheme

We’ve added a URL Scheme which will allow for integration with other third-party apps, helping to make Burner even more useful. Stay tuned for more info about this soon!

We’ve also added stability and performance improvements, various bugs fixes, along with UI Improvements for iPhone 5. 

Hope you enjoy!

We want to share the Burner love this holiday season, so for 24 hours, from 5pm 12/19 to 5pm 12/20 Burner will be on sale for $0.99!

Have you been wanting to try Burner? This is the perfect time to download.

Already using Burner? It makes for a great small gift to a friend or coworker and you can send it right from the App Store!

Click here to visit the App Store

The first interview from Innovate.la with our own Greg Cohn. How Burner got started, the joys of bootstrapping and how you know when you have a good idea. Go Greg! And go Innovate.la!

What Burner does is give you a number that you can pull back. Just like you can unfriend somebody on Facebook, you can disconnect a Burner.

Our hearts are with the friends and families of the victims in Newtown, today and in the coming days, weeks and months.

Such brutality can be traumatic not just for the victims, but for those of us who can only watch as details unfold around this tragedy. We wanted to share some resources for individuals and families attempting to cope with the events that have transpired today. 

• The Disaster Distress Helpline has a 24/7 phone hotline and many written resources available for families, students and adults.
• The Sesame Street Workshop has provided a useful guide to help parents through the difficult task of explaining disasters and events like what happened in Newtown to thier children. 
• You can follow the national Red Cross and the CT Red Cross to stay up to date with their relief efforts and how you can help.

We hope that you have a safe weekend. 

Its that time of year again, when you scratch your head and wonder what to buy for that paranoid impossible to buy anything for friend. These days having a privacy concerned friend doesn't mean that they live off the grid or totally unplugged, so we have some useful everday suggestions that can help anyone protect their personal information. 

Gadgets and Doo-Dads

The Everyday Carry - Have you ever heard of someone getting mugged and not realizing it? I didn't think so. The one good thing about being mugged is you know your ID, credit cards, possbily even your social security card were taken and you can make the appropriate phone calls to prevent any further theft, namely out of your bank account. With RFID chips showing up in most of the cards in our wallets the average person is a walking target to have their personal data lifted at any moment, without realizing it until its too late. Help protect your friend from having to turn into the weirdo that wraps his credit cards in foil and get him an RFID blocking wallet.  

$19.99 from ThinkGeek

Clean Swipe - It doesn't get much less secure than a flash drive. They are just so easy to set down or leave on your desk, and you can only protect them so much, or can you? Now your friend never has to worry about whose hands that little drive falls into with a fingerprint secured flash drive. 

$23.88 from Newegg

Prying Eyes - Ok, now be honest, you know you've done it at least once. You were standing in the line too long at Starbucks and the girl next to you, well she hasn't stopped texting the entire time you've been standing there, your eyes start to wander and the next thing you know you're reading her texts from over her shoulder. Hey, eyes to yourself! See, you need to protect your friends from creepers with peepers like yours. So why don't you hook them up with some screen protectors that will keep their private information private.

$59.99 from Zagg

Apps and Software

Ahoy - Looking for something smaller? Did you know you can gift apps in iTunes? Well you can! Its super easy and much more thoughtful than just a gift card. So why not hook your friend up with some disposable digits with Burner. Burner is great for your single friend so they won't have to give out their number to that creepy guy or that clingy girl at the bar. Who doesn't use Craigslist? Now your friend can sell whatever they want without having to share their real number for all the web to see. We admit, we are a little biased on this one, but hey, if Time thinks we're awesome, I bet your friend will too.  

$1.99 in the App Store

Your eyes only -- I can't wait for someone to go through all the photos on my phone! Said no one ever. Your photos can be some of the most personal and private things on your phone, so this year give the gift of 256 bit encryption on all your friends photos. Whether they want to protect their shots from strangers, kids or their snooping significant other, Photo Safe is sure to be a hit!

$4.99 in the App Store

12345 -- Worst. Password. Ever. I would hope that if you're looking at this guide for your friend, that they have a better system for choosing passwords than sequential numbers or words that exist in the dictionary. But, if they don't and you are feeling generous, you should get them set up with a 1password license. The folks over at AgileBits make it super easy to gift a license to your friend, simly by clicking "gift" during checkout. If they already use 1password you can always gift them the app. 

Price varies from AgileBits

Private Browser - This one is a little more complicated to gift, but possible, and super awesome! Private browsing and IP protection for whatever your friend likes to do on the web *cough, cough* with their own VPN, sounds pretty sweet, right? A VPN is one of those things that most people think sounds cool, but usually never get around to actually paying for and setting up. So here you come with a sweet gift and making for a very happy friend. (There's likely to be recurring yearly or monthly charges, but think of the possiblites, you have a built in gift indefinitely!)

Price varies from London Media Trust

We hope this helps you decide what to buy this year, but if this "friend" we've been talking about happens to be you and you just want to buy all this for yourself, we're not judging.

Last week was a big week for Burner. We are thrilled to have been featured on the NYTimes blog, reached the #5 Utility app in the App Store and named as one of Time Magazine's Top 10 Apps of 2012. The top 10 list feautred some big names like Instagram and Flipboard, so to say we were honored to be among such great company seems like an understatement! 

Welcome if you have recently become part of the Burner community as a result of any of these stories and a huge thank you so all our supporters this year. We have some very, very exciting things on the horizon for Burner so be sure to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to stay updated on what's coming up!