File Access

Technicopia reportedly has introduced gwabbit, described as an automatic E-mail Contact Manager.

 

The product lets users identify and transfer all contact information from an e-mail, including signature files, into the user’s Microsoft (News - Alert) Outlook address book with a single click.  

 

Once in Outlook, these contacts can be transferred to a Blackberry, iPhone (News - Alert), comma-delimited databases and spreadsheets, as well as standalone CRM systems.

 

So if you were looking to “streamline the management of new relationships,” as company officials say, hoping for a product to let you “maintain a current address book without the time-consuming chore of cutting and pasting,” well, this is your lucky day.  

 

The product scans and filters new content to present a prompt not only when a new contact is available, “but also when a new signature file conflicts with current contact information,” according to the gwabbiteers. If you find you spend “hundreds of hours per year” tracking “hundreds, if not thousands, of contacts,” this’ll be twenty bucks well-spent.

 

It uses semantic technology to organize the largely unstructured fields of contact information that most users get in their e-mails every day, parsing the fields using gwabbit’s technology, then transferring them into Outlook’s address book.

 

“Over the years I grew annoyed at having to cut and paste contact information one line at a time from my e-mails to Outlook’s address book. I thought it to be such a daily nuisance that I created gwabbit so I would not have to do it anymore,” said Technicopia CEO Todd Miller. “It is non-productive to have to go back and search the inbox for contacts. I knew this had to be a tedious issue for the millions of Microsoft Outlook users. Gwabbit speaks to an obvious Outlook Achilles’ heel.”

 

Priced at $19.95, gwabbit downloads in under a minute. It’s compatible with Microsoft Outlook 2007, 2003, 2002 (Office XP), and 2000 as well as Microsoft Windows Vista, XP, and 2000.  

 

Miller’s last start-up, WebFeat, a federated search engine, was sold in 2008. Prior to WebFeat, Miller managed digital information divisions for Ziff-Davis and Knight Ridder.

In 2005 WebFeat was used by the New York State Library for implementing a pilot program to test software to let users “simultaneously search across NOVEL databases and other New York State Library databases they have access to.”