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Fruux - MobileMe sync without MobileMe

Written on September 22, 2008 – 11:54 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

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:

I hope you like that post!

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AddressBook, Apple, fruux, mobileme, plaxo, soocial

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Soocial will “totally obliterate” Plaxo and MobileMe

Written on August 8, 2008 – 9:53 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

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?

Question number “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…)