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:
I hope you like that post!
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Written on February 10, 2008 – 9:36 pm Peter Evers, Next Web Mobile editor
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?
Written on January 16, 2008 – 6:50 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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 November 12, 2008 – 7:01 pm
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.
Written on February 10, 2008 – 9:36 pm
Written on January 16, 2008 – 6:50 pm
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