January 4th, 2008
Plaxo up for sale?
New York Times reports that plaxo is up for sale and is looking for around $100M. Plaxo is the only good player i know that does contact sync. I personally think that this is a very important space that no one has come up with a reasonably good solution. In a perfect world I want a service that triple syncs pervasively (web, computer, mobile device), normalize the data to help me migrate to new mobile devices, helps me find old contacts (like facebook) and find new contacts (like linkedin)
I know that most people manage all their contacts thru their cell phone and if they lose their cell phone one day, all their contact info goes with it. Plaxo no only syncs and backups your contacts on your computer with their website, it also keeps it updated by social networking, so that if one of your contacts is also a plaxo user any updates they make to their profile will be sync with your address book as well. I would call it a address book 2.0. When i first used it, i thought the important element it missed from social networking was to let me see who my contacts knew, as this is a important feature of social networking sites to enable you to find old contacts you don;t have in your address book thru people you know.
On a side note, plaxo has a new feature, called plaxo pulse, which is pretty awesome as it syncs my mac (iCal and address book) with their servers and gCal. plaxo pulse does this seemlessly after i sync my iPhone with my Mac. Now i never have to worry about losing my contact info even if i loose my phone or macbook pro. I highly recommend people to use this even if they don’t use a mac or an iphone.
