Web Worker Daily

CloudContacts, a startup aiming to make the information stranded on business cards more accessible, added a new service to its offering this week.

While they may seem archaic, business cards are still the de facto way of sharing contact information. After attending a conference or event I usually have quite a few of them tucked away in my pockets. Extracting that information accurately into my contact manager after the event, however, is a real chore. CloudContacts already offers a pretty innovative service that involves mailing in those business cards you have cluttering up your desk. CloudContacts enters the data on the cards to its online contact management service, which then allows you to export the information to your email app, CRM system or contact manager.

The new service enables you to submit your cards via email. You simply take a snap of the business card with the camera on your phone, email it to the service (via a unique email address generated for your account, similar to the way that TwitPic works) and the information on the card is extracted added to your CloudContacts contact manager. Read the rest of this entry »

In early 2007, tech luminary Tim O’Reilly published a number of thoughts envisioning a more cohesive and universal ‘address book’ application for the Web 2.0 era…these thoughts were quickly labeled as Address Book 2.0.

In the intervening period, we’ve seen companies such as Plaxo and Facebook seek to evolve themselves into the position of defacto social address books, but even such powerful companies have only offered uneven ‘hacks’ for integration with our email, cellphone and IM contact books.

Apple’s Mobile Me service has attempted to provide some of the ‘glue’ to connect these silos of contact data, but at a great price…and of course tied to the Mac universe. It’s also telling that Gmail still lacks a useful API to it’s Contacts data – perhaps data that should really be a standalone application? This has left an opening for companies such as Soocial… Read the rest of this entry »