While strolling around in Nepal, I was suddenly confronted with a problem of years ago. My sister is shooting a documentary here and stays for a few months. Thus she bought a Nepalese phone. A ultra-light plastic device with a SMS memory of around fifteen messages. The latter forces her to only save her most precious text messages – just like eight years ago.
I remember carefully selecting the messages from my flirts or the funniest texts from friends. Unlike now – I save them all – I really looked at my text collection as some sort of lifeline. Sometimes I had to throw a message away – with pain in my heart. If I had only known a service like Mobyko in those days.
Text messages archive in the cloud
This London-based start-up offers mobile phone users a backup service with which you can manage and share your mobile life from a secure online account. This also includes text messages. You can easily forward them to “the cloud” and read them back whenever you want. Such an archive would have been a mobile dream come true.
Don’t lose anything
The Mobyko back-up services of course go further than just SMS messages. That makes the service also relevant for these days. You can sync your contacts and calendar, plus there’s the option of saving, streaming and sharing all your photos and videos (i.e. via a Facebook app). Julian Saunders founded Mobyko in 2006, after losing his mobile phone so that he would never lose his important business contacts and valuable family snaps again.
Compatibility as an USP
Google, Apple, Plaxo, Soocial, and many more offer similar services – yet Mobyko has one major advantage over them. The British service already supports cloud syncing for over 500 mobile phone models. They’re striving to add new models every day, ’cause, their fact sheet says:
10,0000 mobile phones are left in London cabs every month – Credent Technologies
Mobyko is a freemium service while its premium service costs £25 (€29,50) per annum.
Soocial, the Dutch Plaxo competitor, is officially launching today. They have been in closed beta for a while now but are confident enough about their technology to invite the general public now. Soocial enables you to sync your data between your computers, your phones and web applications like Gmail and other web based information managers.
We just spoke with CEO Stefan Fountain who is currently visiting San Francisco (together with co-founder Daniel Spronk) and will speak at the Under the Radar conference there. As of today Soocial will also support Outlook and the Blackberry and over 400 types of mobile phones.
Unfortunately the Blackberry sync won’t be available until later this week and the Outlook client is still in Alpha and who would want to risk their AddressBook with an Alpha product?
Stefan explained that in the future he wants Soocial to able to sync with Windows Live, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn and devices like the iPhone. Soocial also had meetings this week with several companies, including Plaxo, to discuss working together. According to Stefan the people at Plaxo, contrary to what you might expect, reacted very positive and do not consider Soocial a competitor at this time. They mentioned that Soocial could become a potential business partner that could strengthen their Mobile services offerings.
As you can see from the their logo and website the founders of Soocial have a well developed sense of humor and aren’t shy to promote their service in originals ways. Below is a victory dance Stefan did after they raised their first round of funding. Well, I just made that up. I have no idea why he did that dance but it looks very impressive to me. Watch it and decide for yourself:
MobileMe just works for me. But if you take a look at the blogosphere sometimes I seem to be the only on in the world who has a positive experience. Either way, some companies are using MobileMe’s bad rep to launch their own and competing products.
You could use Gmail, Soocial, Plaxo and, since last week, give fruux a try if you are fed up with MobielMe.
fruux is the latest entry into this market. It is a small and convenient system preference pane, that syncs your AddressBook between different macs. fruux supports sync conflict resolution which will help you when you changed a contact on more than one machine.
fruux is a Germany based student start-up. They launched their public beta before the weekend and it is currently localized to German and English. Calendar and bookmark syncing will be added in one of the next updates.
It’s still beta software, so (although nobody managed to kill his AddressBook with fruux yet) we strongly recommend having an AddressBook backup. On the other hand we strongly recommend having a backup even if people don’t try fruux! When was the last time YOU back-up your AddressBook?
Their Road map looks pretty interesting too:
- Bookmark Syncing
- Calendar Syncing
- Preferences Syncing
- “Social Syncing”
- iPhone Sync Client
- fruux Webapp (Addressbook/Calendar/Bookmarks on the go from any internetconnected device)
Download the App for free at the fruux blog or check out this gallery with a few screenshots:
Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.
This time we’re interviewing Stefan Fountain from Dutch start-up Soocial. You might remember the David Hasselhof incident at The Next Web Conference. He was the guy behind it. They’re infamous for their own style, and if you’re not familiar with it yet, you’ll be after reading this article. So what does Soocial actually do? Simple, it’s syncing your contacts between web services, your computer, and your mobile phone.
The guys from Soocial, Stefan is in the one with his arms in the air.
How did you come up with the idea of Soocial?
“SEX! Well not really but we figured you’d read on if I start my answers with sex. I’ll throw random words in my answers to see if we can retain readers attention. HORSES! FIRE! FOES! So how _did_ Soocial start? It was actually when we needed a bunch of new computers and migrating the address book was such a hassle. Then we thought, wait a minute, in order to really solve this problem we need to solve it for our phones too. SWEDISH CHEF! Then after a while we abstracted the base-line idea that you need an address-book solution everywhere you use contacts. In a “nutcase” that is the essence of what Soocial is aiming: to be the de-facto standard contact platform, that enables you to finally have one connected unified address book. Or simpler: we want to supply your address book on the Internet as OS.” (more…)
This is guest post by Reinout H.M. te Brake, Group Strategist for the Spill Group Holding
Google has acquired online address book, Plaxo in a “sub-$200m offer”, according to a blog on tech news site Wired. The site claims that Plaxo has accepted an offer and that the “purchasing company is most likely search engine Google.” The report has sparked various other online rumors, and follows a month of speculation about a major takeover bid. This followed a New York Times report at the beginning of January, which said Plaxo had hired investment bank, Revolution Partners, to handle a forthcoming deal.
Plaxo’s Chief Platform Architect Joseph Smarr
Silicon Valley gossip site, Valleywag, posted a report responding to the Google acquisition rumors claiming that the deal was completed due to good relations between Google’s social-network strategist Brad Fitzpatrick and Plaxo’s Chief Platform Architect Joseph Smarr. However a separate Valleywag report claims that cable operator, Comcast, may be bidding for Plaxo. Meanwhile CNet dismisses the Google rumor as “unlikely.”
In January it was strongly rumored that Facebook were seeking to buy Plaxo, also for $200m, yet this never materialized. A week earlier, the New York Times claimed Plaxo was due to auction itself for some $100m, with investment bankers recruited to handle the deal. Meanwhile, tech site, Techcrunch, this week cited a Silicon Valley insider as saying “Plaxo has been desperately, desperately, desperately trying to sell.”
Mountain View-based Plaxo started in 2002 as an online address book service, but recently shifted its focus to social networking with the launch of Plaxo Pulse. This tool acts as a social network aggregator, providing Facebook-style news feeds when users’ friends update their profiles on sites such as Twitter, Digg, and MySpace. In January Plaxo joined Facebook and Google as part of the Dataportability Group, a body which is working on projects designed to let users of social networks to transfer data from one network to another.
So, who is up to speed here and can give me details!?
I don’t know what they feed the developers at Plaxo but they just keep on coming up with new products and services. We have written about Plaxo a lot here at The Next Web Blog and there are two reasons for that. We like their service and they produce a lot of news.
Just today Plaxo launched a new feature titled ‘Plaxo Personal Card‘. It brings together all your publicly declared feeds or “me links” with the aggregated stream of content from Pulse. Also, it happens to be the first application of the new Social Graph API from Google which was released yesterday, as you can read on TechCrunch. As the guys from Plaxo say: “Now you can share with others one site that pulls all of your online worlds together.”
Sounds pretty fancy, and it actually is, since this means that they’ll compete with LinkedIn from now on. They both offer a public profile, combined with a network of your business contacts.
Plaxo has the advantage of offering a public profile and several syncing services, of which the address book function is the best. Yet LinkedIn seems more suitable for professional networking. Not everybody wants their potential boss or business relation to read your Twitter feeds or to watch those Flickr photos of that awesome party last night. You’d like to save that till you know them better. Of course, you could choose to leave the pictures and tweeds out, but what’s left then?
If you keep all those functions, Plaxo seems like the perfect way to gather all your published on-line content. And they’ve released it just in time, since Netvibes will soon launch their ginger version that includes the ‘My Universe’ option. As you can see on this screenshot of the closed beta version, it’s kind of similar to the Plaxo profile. But it’s not presented as a stream.
As we all know, combining and aggregating our on-line content that is now still scattered around different services is THE trend of 2008. Plaxo is one of the most innovative services in that field right now. And as long as they keep that up, we’ll keep writing about them.
Professional networking service LinkedIn announced today that they’ll open a London office. Chief Executive Dan Nye explained the strategic move in a statement:“LinkedIn has seen outstanding growth in Europe in the past year, and by opening an office in London we expect to accelerate our momentum and better serve our users in the European market,” LinkedIn wants to double the number of members, which is now 18 million. According to Nye, LinkedIn should grow faster in Europe. They have more than five million members now, mostly in Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands.
“I think in 2008 people will start to see the difference between social networking and professional networking.” And professional networking is different in Europe, Nye says. “In the U.S., people do business over the phone, through email. It’s perfectly normal never to meet someone you’ve done business with. In Europe, that’s really unusual. It’s much more of a personal interaction that people want to have.”
However, Europeans, – and especially the Dutch – seem to like professional networking tools. It’s remarkable that one of the smallest countries is responsible for a large share of the LinkedIn European user base. We earlier reported that Plaxo is also extremely popular in the Netherlands.
There is still a huge number of people who have never heard of LinkedIn and Nye wants to target them as well and he has a ‘healthy’ budget for marketing. So far, LinkedIn’s promotion was merely through word-of-mouth, a pretty good buzz and its networking effect . Now it’s time for the not so geeky crowd to start networking.
Pulse is now available for your Mac Address Book and takes care of all your syncing needs. The Plaxo service wants to stay an ‘useful social application that helps people stay connected’. In order to live up to that mission, integration with the Address Book was necessary, according to the press release: “Since most of our members are busy professionals, it’s not enough to enable communication just within the Pulse website; we need to bring Pulse – and the unified address book underlying it – to the communication tools, services, and devices that they use.”
Isn’t that against the trend of moving workspace from the desktop to the browser? We asked John McCrea, VP of Marketing. His answer: “We are working toward a vision of the ’social web’ in which the social graph is able to turbocharge any site, application, or device with users to take their local piece of the social graph with them wherever they go.”
So it’s basically a way of making sure that people have access to their contacts wherever they go. Until full wireless Internet coverage isn’t a dream anymore, this sounds like a plausible reason.
Yet I do think that this whole syncing thing also is a way to tempt people to move their workspace to online applications, such as Pulse. By giving people the feeling that their stuff ALSO remains on their computer, they’re willing to give the online application a try. So this won’t be the last integration tool we will hear of in the near future. What about Google Calendar syncing two-ways with iCal?
Since Plaxo launched its Plaxo Pulse service it has seen another surge in its growth. The last time Plaxo published its numbers was in 2006 when it reported 15 million active users after it doubled its userbase within 6 months. Since then it has launched its popular Pulse service and the first live OpenSocial implementation.
“Dutch pageviews jumped from 2% to 6% of total”
Last week John McCrea (vice president of marketing for Plaxo) contacted me with an interesting tidbit of information regarding the growth of Plaxo Pulse. It seems that in terms of adding new Pulse users the Netherlands has the highest growth rate of all countries. Dutch Pulse pageviews jumped from 2% of total to 6% of total in one week. As you can see in the graph here, it is highly likely that Dutch users will overtake the UK to become the second-largest userbase outside the US.
Netherlands is light green; UK is dark yellow
There seems to be no special event that led to this sudden growth except the OpenSocial announcement by Google. However, the Netherlands is a very active social networking country with its largest social network (Hyves) adding its 5th million member somewhere this week.
Written on 2nd December 2008
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This London-based start-up offers mobile phone users a backup service with which you can manage and share your mobile life from a secure online account. This also includes text messages. You can easily forward them to “the cloud” and read them back whenever you want. Such an archive would have been a mobile dream come true.
Written on 12th November 2008
“SEX! Well not really but we figured you’d read on if I start my answers with sex. I’ll throw random words in my answers to see if we can retain readers attention. HORSES! FIRE! FOES! So how _did_ Soocial start? It was actually when we needed a bunch of new computers and migrating the address book was such a hassle. Then we thought, wait a minute, in order to really solve this problem we need to solve it for our phones too. SWEDISH CHEF! Then after a while we abstracted the base-line idea that you need an address-book solution everywhere you use contacts. In a “
Written on 11th February 2008
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
