Big Contacts

What's Coming

Most companies usually hate talking about features that aren't available yet. However, a number of beta users have been asking for features, some of which are quite far along, and I want to share those with you.

First, we will be adding sales tracking features to Big Contacts. This was actually completed in October, but we held this out of the initial launch. It is working well and we have a dozen people who have been using it for several months. You can expect this within the next week or two to be launched. You can create products, sales commissions and your own sales pipeline. Then you can add sales opportunities and track them. This is something that is especially useful if you are part of a sales team - you will really use this feature.

Second, we will be adding true synchronization with Outlook and with Palm devices. This has been built and is now in internal testing. You will be able to run a  client program on your PC or on your Palm handheld and sync your contacts and calendar with Big Contacts. You can expect this to be available in our beta test before the end of January, barring any problems we run into in testing. Other device classes will come later.

Third, we have been working on a very simple way to integrate your email with Big Contacts. We don't want to replace your email program, but we do want to show you all the email threads that relate to a contact in Big Contacts. It will be simple to set up and just work. Stay tuned for details.

Finally, we are developing a REST API. There are many ways you might want to access your contact data, tasks and calendar. We also want to work with third parties to tie their applications to Big Contacts. Our system was architected with the intention of releasing a REST API. We just have a little bit of plumbing and documentation to finish up.

International Characters

When you launch a new product like this, you never know where the interest is going to come from. Some of the early blogs that picked us up were in countries like Spain, Germany and Italy. To date, about half of the people who have signed up for Big Contacts have come from outside of North America.

Thats great! Except we didn't plan on it. A number of our new users noticed our poor support for International Characters (or Unicode). If you don't know what I mean, I am referring to all of those accented characters you would see used often in Spanish or German or other languages that you do not see in English. Our backend is based on PHP, which is a wonderful language, but has very poor support for Unicode. It works mainly in another character set called UTF8. We have worked around this problem. I am sure most of you don't care about the technical details and just want it to work.

The good news is we now have good support for most International Characters. We also now better support cutting and pasting from Microsoft Word which was bringing in odd characters sometimes. Please let us know if you run across problems with this. Use the send Feedback and tell us about it.

And, we welcome our worldwide user base!

Contact Tags

One of the great things about getting a product into beta is that you start to hear some awesome ideas from your early users. A number of people have suggested that we add tagging for contacts. That's a great idea and I'm wondering why we didn't think of it :-).

We quickly put together a crash effort. And we now have Tags!

You can enter any number of tags for a contact. They are displayed as part of the 'business card'. Click on a tag and it takes you to the contact browser to see all the other contacts with that tag. We will be adding a contact tag cloud soon.

Keep those terrific ideas coming in!

Amazon S3

After weeks of testing, we have now turned on Amazon S3 for storage. S3 is a way of storing files on the Internet using Amazon's infrastructure. Think of it as a big cloud where you can put things and get them in near real time when you need to. Using S3 allows us to continue to offer 500MB with all Free Editions and maintain a low cost for our future paid Editions. This will have no effect on how the system works. You will save files and photos the same way. You will retrieve them the same way. But, they will now be distributed on Amazon's network which puts the files in multiple locations as away of backing them up. We set the private setting on all files so only we can access them. We are a big believer in the future of web services and think this is one of the most impressive we have seen.

Go here to learn more about Amazon S3

IM support added

Based on user requests, we have added IM support to Big Contacts.

You can assign a screen name to each contact. You also need to select the IM service, currently we are supporting AIM and Yahoo. After saving the screename and service, anytime you pull up a contact, it will show their screename and if they are on-line or not. You can click on their screename to launch your IM client and message them. Should be pretty easy to use and a neat way to store all of your contacts IM info. Try it out and let us know what you think with the Feedback box.