Big Contacts

Big Contacts is out of beta!

This morning, we pushed the button and launched the full production version of Big Contacts. It is exciting to finally be out of beta and officially launched. Thanks to the thousands of registered users and the huge number of people that provided us tremendous feedback and ideas during our open beta period. Thank you - you have helped make Big Contacts what it is - the premier web based contact manager.

You may notice a few new things that we did not have before.

• Edit in place - you can click on an item in the business card and make changes right there. Click on the 'edit-me' icon to make changes to phone numbers, email address and websites.
• Improved import wizard - start by telling the wizard what you are importing from. We  provide extensive help on how to get your data. We then directly map data based on what you are importing from. Try it out!
• Internationalization - we added many new timezones. We have added several new date and time formats. We have options for different currencies. We support more international character sets. And we have phone number formatting.
• Advanced Search - is now better organized and easier to use

There is much more help available.  And, we have cleaned up the interface in a number of places that you might not even notice, but wanted to make Big Contacts as clean and easy to use as possible.

Big Contacts API Released

We're excited to today announce the availability of our first REST API. An API is an alternative  way to access your data without going through our web application. You can write your own interface for your data. Or, you can use your data in Mash Ups. See Teqlo for an exciting example of how mashups can be used to create really neat and useful applications.

See the Big Contacts API Wiki for more details.

Right now, the API works only with contact data. You can authenticate, do searches, pull down data, update data and add contacts. We will be adding  calendar functions to the API in a few days. Over the next month or so, we will include more aspects of our system in the API.

It is available - have at it! And, let us know if we can help you with using the API. To get started, you will need an API ID and password. Contacts us at support@bigcontacts.com or use the 'Send Feedback' box.

Sales Opportunity Tracking added to Big Contacts

It has been a few weeks since I have posed. We've been busy!

This week we have released the newest feature of Big Contacts  - a full featured sales manager. If you are in  sales or manage sales people, this will be a very useful feature for you. You can track all of your sales activity. You can create a sales pipeline process. And, you can project your sales for the upcoming month or quarter.

For more details on tracking sales opportunities, please look at the Big Contacts Wiki

One of the great features that is unique to our sales tracking system is the automatic update of close dates. If you have ever used a sales tracking system before, you know that one of the most frustrating parts is keeping it up to date. The one piece that must be accurate is the close date. Why? If you cannot predict when an opportunity will close, then you will not have an accurate prediction of your upcoming business. In sales, things are always changing and invariably, the close date gets pushed out on many of your opportunities. They don't close when you thought they would. If you predicted a sale would occur on February 15th and it is now March 15th and you did not update the opportunity, your data is now bad. Best case, your sales projection is off. Worst case, the opportunity drops off the radar and is lost. With Big Contacts your close dates are updated for you - automatically. When you create your sales pipeline, you set a sales cycle for each pipeline stage. The sales cycle is the minimum number of days it takes to close form a specific stage. If an opportunity's close date is less than the minimum sales cycle, it is pushed out so that it meets the minimum sales cycle. You never have to update a close date, just update the pipeline stage and Big Contacts takes care of the rest.

If you are a sales manager, you know that salespeople don't like using sales tracking tools because of the amount of work to keep them up to date. With Big Contacts, you can create a sales pipeline with close percentages and sales cycles. You then add your products and services and the commission rates. Then all your salespeople need to do is add the opportunities and update the pipeline stage for each opportunity when they reach the next milestone.

This should be easier than any other system you have used before. Give it a try. And, use the 'Send Feedback' box if you have any questions whatsoever.

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.

Replacing Snap preview with Amazon Alexa

I really love the idea behind Snap Preview. I learned about it from Michael Arrington's Techcrunch - he uses it extensively to great effect on his blog. The value of a web page preview is there. I am definitely more like to click on a link if I can see a thumbnail of the page. I'm not sure how universal this feeling is, but it is absolutely true for me. BTW, I wonder why Google or Yahoo don't do this for their text ads, if it bumps click-through by a percent or two - hmmmm.....

Unfortunately, we've had to turn off Snap Preview. It was just too inconsistent for us. Every once in a while it would significantly delay the page loading. To be fair, we're changing links on the fly with Ajax and I'm not sure Snap is designed for that. We spent some time trying to decipher the Javascript but they've obfuscated it just enough where we could not tell where the problem is. In the end, since we could not fix things and decided we could not accept the occasional delay, we had to drop Snap Preview.

The good news is there is a  new alternative available. Amazon has released Alexa Site Thumbnail. We have tested it and it works quite nicely. It should be available within a week or so on Big Contacts. Two downsides. We have to pay $1 per 5,000 thumbnails (I think we can handle that!) and Amazon says there could be up to a 24-hour delay before a new site is thumbnailed (is that a word?). We will request the thumbnail as soon as someone saves a web site, so the delay may not be too noticeable. Hopefully, it does not actually take that long and/or Amazon speeds things up as the service matures.

Stay tuned ....

Features, features, features

One of the hardest things about building a product like Big Contacts is deciding what features to include. A contact manager could potentially have a nearly infinite number of features. ACT and to some extent salesforce.com have tried just that. Of course, what suffers is quality and, more so, ease of use.

Joel Spolsky, who writes one of my favorite blogs - Joel on Software, addressed this in a recent post simply titled Simplicity.  He correctly points out the fallacy of the 80/20 rule. There is a common knowledge rule that says 80% of users only use 20% of the features of a product. Therefore it would follow that focusing on those 20% of the features people would use would make for a better product. What Joel points out, and is obvious in retrospect, is that those 20% of the features are different for each person! I might use only 20% of the features of The GIMP, but there is probably one feature I cannot live without that you've never heard of.

Given that, how do you make decisions about what features to include? There are no easy answers. There are two things we try to do here at Big Contacts. One is to use the product every day, all day. We find out quickly what needs improving that way. Secondly, we listen carefully when people offer ideas. We try to find out what they are really trying to do and, if it is important, find an efficient way to do it. But, even then, we have to filter out those features that just don't seem to be widely applicable, or have an easy workaround. Like I said, it ain't easy.