Like many of us, I spend a lot of time on the web and come across a staggering number of interesting things. In Clearing The Cache I pull out some of my favorites and share them with you here.
Finally, I just love Nicholas Bate and his hilarious ongoing series of posts documenting the species known as Homo Berriens:
“Accentuated fingers enable small keyboards to be adroitly managed at speed while simultaneously executing other activities such as eating cereal, walking the dog or sky-diving.”
Having complete and accurate contact information for the folks you communicate with is an important, but often neglected, practice. Oftentimes, the details we need are included in our email communication, but the process of capturing that information is difficult or time-consuming.
Automatic text parsing of emails to make this process easier is becoming more common, though. On the desktop side of things we have the gwabbit for Outlook application we looked at back in March, which got mixed reviews from us. In my testing I thought it worked well, while Simon preferred Anagram, which offers similar functionality.
Not being a regular Outlook user, though, gwabbit offered little long-term value for me, and I imagine quite a few of us use web-based tools for our CRM needs.
The folks behind gwabbit are hoping to ease our pain by bringing their offering to the mobile platform, beginning with gwabbit for Blackberry, which they announced today at WES 2009.
gwabbit for BlackBerry brings the same single-click identifying process to your mobile where you can then use the inherent sync capabilities of the device to get this information into your contact manager of choice.
The application will be available from Blackberry App World on May 25 and will cost $9.95 annually.
Last week ,we reviewed gwabbit, an app that aims to automatically pull contact data from emails in Outlook. Scott Blitstein was positive about gwabbit, but it didn’t work as well for me when I tried it: sometimes it was unable to extract my contact data, even though it was cleanly presented in the email’s signature block.
I really like the idea of being able to extract that useful information without having to manually copy and paste, though, so when Nicholas Maddix of Textual emailed me to tell me about Anagram, a similar Windows app, and it was also recommended by a couple of commenters on our gwabbit review, I thought I’d check it out.
Anagram is like gwabbit in that you can use it to extract contact data from emails. However, it’s more flexible, in that you can use it to capture information from any text, not just emails, and it’s not restricted to contacts: Anagram will examine any text you throw at it and automatically attempt to capture calendar events, to-do items and notes, too. Here’s a quick screencast of it in action capturing some contact data and adding a calendar event to Outlook:
Having complete and accurate contact information for the folks you communicate with is an important, but often neglected, practice. Oftentimes, the details we need are included in our email communication, but the process of capturing that information is difficult or time-consuming.
Last week ,we 
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
