Gwabbit made a splash earlier this year at DEMO 2009 when it showed off software that can automate the process of taking contacts from emails and putting them into Microsoft Outlook's address book. Now it's doing the same thing for BlackBerry smart phones.
When an email comes into the BlackBerry, Gwabbit will automatically search for contact information. It will then check to see if the contact is already in the BlackBerry's address book. If it is, it will do nothing. If the contact isn't there, the software asks users if they want the contact information entered. If the user says yes, Gwabbit automatically adds the contact information. In that sense, it's a big time saver.
Todd Miller, chief executive of Carmel Valley, Calif.-based Technicopia, which built the Gwabbit product, said the company is filling out its contact cloud offerings with the expansion into BlackBerrys, allowing users to have access to their most current contacts anywhere they roam.
The BlackBerry version will be available for sale on Gwabbit's web page on May 25 for $9.95 a year. That's different from the Outlook version, which costs a one-time fee of $19.95. The BlackBerry version has a higher lifetime cost because the BlackBerry doesn't have the processing power to do the constant tasks of monitoring emails and entering new contacts, leaving Technicopia to perform that processing on its servers.
Miller said the February launch of the Outlook version succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He said 43 percent of customers purchased it without even doing a trial. Traditionally, of those who try out software, only about 2 percent actually buy it. But Miller said more than 20 percent of customers are buying it Gwabbit after a trial.
The application is Miller's brainchild, and the name is a combination of the words grab it and rabbit/wabbit (hence, the silly rabbit mascot). Miller had the idea as far back as 2001. He was sick and tired of pasting contacts, field by field, into Outlook. But he was tied up with another startup, WebFeat, which created a federated search engine for research and business purposes.
In 2008, he sold that business to ProQuest and was stunned to discover that Microsoft still hadn’t automated its tedious contact system. When he looked around, he found solutions like Address Grabber. The Xobni email manager has a similar solution that grabs phone numbers, but for some reason it doesn’t grab the rest of the contact data and store it. Another competitor is Anagram, which has had a contact capture app out for some time. Miller funded the project with his own money. He anticipates the company will be profitable in two months.
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