Written on 7th February 2009
6 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Foxmarks, what was once just a Firefox bookmarks sync tool has now been made available to Safari and IE users too. With your bookmarks online and accessible on the most popular browsers on Mac and PC, your bookmarks are finally likely to remain with you for life.
As Lifehacker points out, although bookmarks sync perfectly – there are a few sad exclusions:
No Password Syncing
No syncing bookmarks to your own server
iPhone sync only for Safari’s version of the Mac
Walt Mossberg was first to try the tool and has given a basic but solid overview of the service on All Things D. You can also view a video of the review below.
To install the tool, visit the Foxmarks download page and download either Foxmarks for Firefox, Foxmarks for IE (pc) or Foxmarks for Safari (Mac only).
Lets hope Opera, Chrome and Linux users out there are given similar functionality in the near future.
On a side note, I wonder if Foxmarks now plans to change their name…
Ok, so you got your notes (Evernote!), contacts, calendars, email, and bookmarks synced between your desktop and phone – but what about your documents? California-based Soonr wants to help you with that by giving you access to documents wherever you are, especially when you own that Apple phone.
Soonr’s desktop client (Mac and PC) uploads selected files to the cloud and syncs them every time you make changes. It’s currently compatible with 40 different file types. You can access the files with almost every smart phone, as the service works on most mobile web browsers. But when you’re the proud owner of the shiny iPhone, you got a nifty app to your disposal.
Song Huang, co-founder of Soonr and Chief Evangelist, takes you through the cloud-based features Soonr brings to the iPhone.
Some cool aspects you might not miss: you can easily send the files to other persons by email or SMS and it’s also possible to print them via a Wifi connection. There’s also a revision history and the option to comment on the doc – in case you’re collaborating with others. Editing isn’t possible (yet).
By launching this cool app, Soonr has an advantage compared to competitors like Dropbox. First, it gets a wave of attention – it’s the freaking iPhone man – and secondly, there’s no prettier and effective way of viewing documents on a mobile phone:
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:
Last week I decided to explore ZYB.com. The guys from this service say it brings mobile data to life. Sounds pretty exciting to me. So I started to bring my own mobile data to life. And before I knew it, my data was leading a life on its own. I’ll tell you what happened. I’ve uploaded all my phone numbers to ZYB in order to store my phone numbers online and enrich them with all kinds of information about people I have in my phone book. But when I checked if there were any other ZYB users in my phone book, I discovered that I was the only one. At this point ZYB had lost all it’s relevance to me. But quitting ZYB without really knowing what it is didn’t seem right, so I decided to invite a few friends by sending them an automatically generated ZYB-invite text message. This is where it all went wrong. Somehow I hit the ‘invite all’-button which was positioned one millimeter from the ‘invite’-button. At that point many phones around me in the office started ringing. Yes, this meant that I had sent a text message to all the 500 people in my phone book. I’ve spent the rest of the day on answering calls and text messages from disheartened old friends, business partners and colleagues who asked what the hell ZYB was. I couldn’t tell them, I just apologized.
So my first experience with ZYB was pretty bad. But a closer look on ZYB doesn’t quite change my opinion. ZYB has very few users, no one in my phone book uses it and after inviting all of them, still none of them are using it. Many users seem to be Danish, which gives me the impression that most users are friends of the Danish developers of ZYB. The ZYB community looks pretty boring too, probably because of the lack of users.
The biggest advantage of ZYB would be the possibility to store your phone numbers online, safely and secured (but don’t hit the wrong button). The funny thing is that a couple of days later I updated my Nokia N95 8GB and accidentally lost all my phone numbers. All my numbers were still in ZYB, so I could just download them back to my phone. But because of the automatic synchronization with both my office PC and my Mac at home I got all my numbers back before I could even think of ZYB. So what does ZYB really add?
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?
Written on 7th February 2009
6 COMMENTS 
Foxmarks, what was once just a Firefox bookmarks sync tool has now been made available to Safari and IE users too. With your bookmarks online and accessible on the most popular browsers on Mac and PC, your bookmarks are finally likely to remain with you for life. 
Written on 5th January 2009
Written on 12th November 2008
Written on 10th 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 
