Cell Knight

What does Cell Knight do?

Cell Knight is a service that helps you take control of your mobile phone minute usage. The service acts as your agent and retrieves your minute usage from your cellphone provider website multiple times every day. If your usage exceeds your preset limits, the service alerts you by email and/or by SMS (text message). In addition, the service provides your recommended daily minute usage information so that you don't exceed your minutes quota.

How does Cell Knight find my minute usage?

As part of the sign up process, you provide the username and password credentials for your cellphone provider online account. Our automated software uses this information to securely fetch your minute usage related information multiple times daily from your cellphone provider website.

Okay, why do I need such a service? I thought I could check my minutes online myself.

You are right. You can check your minute usage online at your wireless provider's website. But still, about 16.5 million people exceed their cell phone minutes every month. The reason is that not only is the process of checking minutes yourself cumbersome and time-consuming, but most importantly, you have to remember to check your minutes usage. And that too, multiple times every day.

A brief survey of our users shows that nobody consistently checks their minutes usage even once a day. Even those who went over their minutes and were hit by a hefty cellphone bill as a result of the overage charges stop checking their minutes a couple months after the month in which they got a huge cellphone bill. It is simple human nature.

The Cell Knight service automates the entire process of monitoring minutes usage so that you don't have to worry about checking your minutes multiple times everyday. You can relax and enjoy your peace of mind knowing that the knight is hard at work protecting you from accidentally going over your allowed minutes.

I have a shared (family) plan. Do I need to create CellKnight account for each phone?

No. You just need to create one account with your primary cellphone number. Cell Knight will send you an aggregated usage for all the cellphones under the shared/family plan. The alerts that you set will be set on the combined peak minutes usage for all phones under the plan because that is what wireless providers use to charge you overage fees. This way, you will be able to monitor your entire family's minute usage by creating just one Cell Knight account.

I have a family with teenage kids. Can I set alerts for each phone in my family plan?

Not yet. However, it is an upcoming feature of Cell Knight and will be available in the near future. We will notify all existing users by email when this feature becomes available.

What are Yellow, Orange, and Red alerts?

You can customize upto three alert levels by setting minutes used thresholds for Yellow, Orange, and Red alerts. For example, let's say that you are allowed 700 peak minutes each month under your current cellphone plan. You can tell Cell Knight to send you a Yellow alert when your minutes usage crosses, say, 600 minutes, an Orange alert when your minutes usage crosses 650 minutes and a Red alert when you have used up more than 680 minutes.
You can change these alert threshold values anytime, thereby affecting when the various alerts are sent to you.

Am I required to receive all the there alerts (Yellow, Orange, and Red)?

No. You must set a minutes usage threshold for Red alert. The Yellow and Orange alert thresholds are optional. If you leave the Yellow and/or Orange alert threshold fields empty then you will not receive Yellow and/or Orange alerts respectively.

What should I set my Yellow, Orange and Red thresholds to?

We recommend setting your yellow threshold to 60% of your maximum allowed minutes, orange threshold to 75% of your maximum allowed minutes and red threshold to 90% of your maximum allowed minutes. This way, you will have enough advance notice to avoid the impending minute overuse disaster. If you choose not to customize your thresholds at all, the service will automatically set the thresholds as above. You are of course, given full flexibility to change your alert threshold values according to your specific preference.

Where do I receive the alert notifications?

The alerts are sent via email to your primary email address. By default, alerts are also sent by SMS (text message) to your primary cellphone. You can choose not to receive SMS alerts by unchecking the "Send alerts by SMS" check-box on the "Alert Settings" page.
You can choose to recieve the email alerts at additional email addresses (such as emails of other family members under the shared/family plan) by specifying additional email addresses on the Alert Settings page.

What are summary emails?

Summary emails provide a summary of your minutes usage information. More importantly, they provide a recommendation on daily minutes usage so that you don't exceed your minutes quota. The recommendation is computed using the number of minutes left in your quota and the number of weekdays remaining until your cycle end date.

When do I get my summary emails?

If you chose receive summary emails once a week then summary emails are typically sent out on Wednesdays. If you chose to receive summary emails twice a week then you will typically receive them on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and so on.

I just changed my cell phone provider. Do I need to sign up again?

No. You can simply sign into your Cell Knight account and modify your provider information using the "Update Provider" menu.

I changed my cellphone number. How can I update my CellKnight account with the new number?

If your cellphone number changed then you will need to Delete your current account and sign up for a new CellKnight account using your new phone number. You need to do this even if you kept the same wireless provider.

I am not getting any emails from Cell Knight. Is everything okay?

You should be getting summary emails from Cell Knight every week as per your chosen schedule/frequency.
If you have not been receiving the summary emails, please check the Spam folder on your email client. You might need to specify that these emails from CellKnight are not Spam so that they are not filtered out by your email service.

Can the information collected by Cell Knight identify a person?

To protect your privacy, Cell Knight does not ask for your name, address, or any such identifiable information. Hence, it is not possible to correlate the information you provide to Cell Knight to reveal your identity solely using the information in Cell Knight database.

If somebody gets hold of my wireless provider online account login and password then they can find my credit card, social security, and other information. Right?

Wrong! Wireless providers do not show your credit card number, social security number, or any such sensitive information in the online account. In fact, it is impossible to find such information from your online account. If you are one of those few people who think that wireless providers display credit card number, then log into your wireless provider online account and try finding your credit card number yourself. Try it!

What information does Cell Knight software see on my wireless provider online account?

Our software only looks at your total peak minutes used, your total number of allowed minutes, and date on which your current monthly cycle ends (that is, the date when your monthly quota of allowed minutes resets).
It does not look at any other information.

Can your software access my phone bill and my call history on my wireless provider online account?

Nope. Cell Knight has a very strong privacy policy in place and we strictly enforce that privacy policy (http://www.cellknight.com/PrivacyPolicy.aspx).
What this means is that our software only looks at your minutes usage information mentioned above. It does not look at what phone you have, it does not see your current bill, and it does not see who you called or who called you. Anything other than total minutes usage related information is irrelevant to Cell Knight and is not looked at by our software.

I trust you guys but how do you make sure that nobody gets hold of my wireless provider online account credentials?

The Cell Knight website has industry standard security measures in place to prevent the loss, alteration or misuse of your personal information. All your information is behind at least two layers of Firewall protected by encrypted passwords. Further, multiple levels of strong encryption are used to protect your wireless provider online account credentials. Moreover, we take all other reasonable steps to protect your information.

How can I find out more about you guys?

Just Google us :)
Cell Knight is not a no-name website where you cannot find any information about the people behind that website. Our profiles, resumes, background, etc. are all public information that you can find about from our parent company website (http://www.jinglepal.com) or from our patents consulting website (http://www.thoughtnucleus.com).

You can Google our names (a. Labhesh Patel, b. Sanjeev Kumar, PhD) to find out about our patents, our publications, and even Salsa Dance teaching!

BTW, if you are gonna Google our names anyways, try the following fun search phrases as well:

• Labhesh Patel quotes
• Labhesh Patel Salsa

Why is CellKnight free?

First and foremost, we started CellKnight as a service to society, being victim of huge cellphone overage charges ourselves. We want as many people as possible to benefit from this service and the best way to achieve this goal was to keep this service free.

Second, we have developed an Artificial Intelligence based technology for web page understanding. Basically, our software attempts to make sense out of pages in a manner similar to how you and I do it. CellKnight is a basic testbed for that technology. By keeping CellKnight running, we get to test our technology as it evolves and you get to keep track of your minutes for free.

Will CellKnight always be free?

Yes, our goal is to keep the CellKnight service always free for the general population.

How can I help to keep CellKnight free?

First, please spread the good word about CellKnight to your friends, family, and colleagues. If you are happy with the service, tell them that you are using it and that you find it very useful (be honest about it!).

Also, donations, even in tiny amounts, are always appreciated. If you are happy with the service, please consider making a small donation to support Cell Knight :)
If you need help on how much to donate, just ask yourself the question: if Cell Knight was not free, what would have been a fair annual price for this service?

Great! Now, how do you make money?

We have several things going to keep us happily employed.

First, we happen to be inventors on a large number of patents (roughly 200 patents or patents pending). Based on our experience, we have a thriving Intellectual Property consulting service called Thought Nucleus that helps companies in all matters of innovation, invention, patents, and IP litigation. If you happen to work for a company that could make use of our services, we will highly appreciate if you could refer them to us.

Second, as mentioned above, we have developed an intelligent software that understands contents of web pages. We are in the process of rolling out products and services using that technology. Some of the products and services will be free just like CellKnight and others will be paid services. We hope that if you like our free services, you will also like our paid services. That is where we expect to make some revenue in the future.

I work for a company that is looking to enhance its patents portfolio. Can you guys help?

Of course, that is what we do for a living. Please refer your company's patents team to the Thought Nucleus website (http://www.thoughtnucleus.com).

I work for a company that is involved in a patents litigation. Can you guys help?

Yes, we have helped lawyers make their case in several IP lawsuits in the Silicon Valley. We are usually called upon to interpret contentious / ambiguous claims in the patents under litigation. We can help your legal department by providing patents interpretation expertise and other services. Please refer your legal department to http://www.thoughtnucleus.com.

Questions or Concerns

If you have any questions or concerns not addressed by this FAQ, please contact us by email at: support@cellknight.com