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Your company

When you go into Your Company, we have simplified the navigation with the new tabs underneath - Company profile, Team and Invite Your Team.  Each of these tabs do as you would expect to be honest, or at least, that is the intention! Show you your company info and activity, show you your teams info and activity and enable you to invite people in.

Assigning a Tweet as a task is really straightfroward in ContactZilla. There are many reasons why you might want to do this. We do it for following up people that are discussing all kinds of things to do with contacts and ContactZilla. We then assign the tweet to the best person for the job.

Once you've added some contacts with Twitter accounts to a company, you can go to the company and click the "Twitter Feed" action in the "Actions" menu on the right.

The assign button brings up an overlayed window with a copy of the message, which you can edit, a due date and a person to assign the task to.

Once your task is assigned it will appear in the assignees page and they will also be notified by email of the impending task.

Start-ups need to be in the States. Full stop. It's a different bloody universe. Here in the UK, Angels, like VC's want super traction before an investment. Understandable but not very useful for innovative ideas and models. In the US they understand the risk and "spread bet", being more likely to put smaller amounts into a collection of new companies or just plain great ideas.

Yuri Milner as part of SV Angel has just pledged $150,000 dollars in convertible debt to ALL Y Combinator startups. This is just amazing. For all the YC's this means they have a security blanket that just dropped from the sky, giving them every opportunity to get their product built, tested and some early professional marketing.

Where's this kind of attitude in the UK? Or even in Europe? 

I read a lovely little snippet recently that in the UK entrepreneur take twenty years to exit from their company and then move abroad and settle in the sun. In the states it will be eight years and then instead of buggering off, they will help companies like the, investing in a portfolio of young companies. Creating a cycle of innovation and growth.

I think in the US this cycle has just been strengthened a lot. I wonder if we'll ever see this kind of thing in Europe?

We know the service has been slow recently so we are currently upgrading the servers to provide a much faster user experience.

Please see the following post for more tech info http://contactzilla.posterous.com/wake-up-some-tech-insight

We are sorry for the service being offline during this upgrade. We aim to have things fully restored by 13.00 pm on the 18th Jan 2011 GMT.

Thank you,

The ContactZilla Team

Hello to all of our Beta users and thanks for trying out ContactZilla.

I just wanted to write a quick post as a point of reference for some of the feedback we've been getting regarding the speed of the product.

The exposure in Tech Crunch has been great but it inevitably brought with it a lot of traffic. We actually quadrupled our user base!

All of these extra users have slowed the system down (quite considerably at times) because we have, to date, been running on a single server and when an import is requested it puts in lots of queued web requests. So, for a single person importing 1000 contacts they might actually generate well over 1000 http requests for a single import. We are working on changing the architecture of this so the system does not endure the overhead of these additional http requests.

In the mean time, we have provisioned another 3 servers two of which we have put lots of RAM in and fast SSD drives for the database, we are testing everything internally at the moment and we hope to get these plugged in next week at some point.

Sorry to anyone that did not get an invite code this time, we will be sending out more when we are happy we have rectified the issues and are back to providing a great service.

Any questions, please ask them here and I will be more than happy to answer.

Thanks,

Tom

Adding contacts in ContactZilla is very easy and is split into two processes, essentially manually and bulk.

No matter which way you choose to add contacts, every-time a contact is added into ContactZilla some clever de-duping will try and match the contact with an existing contact based on email address, mobile number and various social networks. ContactZilla will also start looking for any external PUBLIC information on that contact that it can use to fill out their profile and enhance the de-duping process.

The Import Contacts page allows for bulk importing. There are two sections.

Social Import

The Social Section which includes Twitter, Gmail and LinkedIn (look out for Facebook soon). Basically ContactZilla will connect to your account and suck out the contacts and go through the de-duping and lookup process outlined above. You don't need to do anything involving files or uploads.

Other Import sources

This section lets you use more traditional sources for getting your contacts into the system. You will generally need to provide some kind of authentication details or upload a file. Each contact imported goes through the same de-duping and lookup process as above.

Adding contacts manually

In the contacts tabbed section of ContactZilla wherever you see the "Add Contact" button you can add a new contact (and company).

A window will open after clicking asking you for a contact's details. You can enter all the standard information that you would expect.

There a few areas to note:

1. When adding a company, as you start to type it will search for a company that already exists in the system to prevent you adding companies more than once.
   
2. The little green plus icons allow you to add more fields. So you can add more websites, social networks, addresses, phone numbers, etc. The red icon with the minus sign in it does the opposite and deletes any unnecessary data, this is especially useful when ContactZilla automatically adds lots of extra profile data.
3. The tags area allows you to classify your contacts in multiple ways. While at the moment there is not a lot of functionality to use this feature in the next release with "Smart lists" this will become a very powerful feature. For example you will be able to create dynamic lists based tags and profile data, i.e. "show me all contacts tagged with prospects, in aerospace, using Twitter, in Bristol"...

All manually added contacts go through the same de-duping and lookup procedure mention earlier. When you drill down into a contact after adding a contact you amy still find that there is an existing contact in the system. This is because ContactZilla isn't sure if it's a duplicate or not, so instead of doing anything rash it asks for you to confirm if it is or isn't.

Many years ago one of my tunes was played by John Peel on Radio 1 followed by a live phone interview. As one half of a pair of struggling musicians that had worked long and hard (for bugger all money) it gave us an amazing morale boost and gained us some very interesting feedback and interest from the most unexpected places.

Last week ContactZilla saw its first peek of publicity via an article in Techcrunch. I had the same tingly feeling as I did back in the day with John Peel, as well as the same sense of "shit, this is all coming together"...

It's amazing the reach that Techcrunch has and its diverse volume of readers. The inevitable server strain washed over us and a few interesting bugs raised their lovely little heads. Frankly this was great. The whole idea of giving out invites in this way is to stress test our infrastructure, see where the weaknesses are, and patch them up. We've got some interesting challenges ahead. 

So we've hit our first big milestone for ContactZilla - 500 users, 100,000 contacts and a stable platform. So now we're at the beginning. It's taken us a year to get to the beginning! 2010 was great, 2011 will be better. We've got some awesome technology and a sound business to back it up.

One thing I do know is that you'll be hearing a lot more from our development team in the coming months... They really are amazing.

I'm not sure the Techcrunch piece beat being featured by John Peel but it was close. Maybe next time.

I've been reading the "the Agile Samurai" - a really great book on agile project management. It also has a few little snippets of wisdom that work well outside of projects and development.

One thing in particular caught my eye, a kind of wizard for elevator pitches.

Here's the template:

• For [target customer]
• who [statement of need or opportunity]
• the [product name]
• is a [product category]
• that [key benefit, compelling reason to buy].
• Unlike [primary competitive alternative]
• our product [statement of primary differentiation].

I've combined this with the "high pitch concept" which is a way to summarise your start-up into two or three words (i.e. it's like Facebook but for cats - Catbook... etc..)

So for ContactZilla we're looking at something like this:

ContactZilla - "LinkedIn meets Plaxo" for teams

For teams and businesses who need to keep track of their contacts the ContactZilla platform is a contact management solution that merges contacts from social media and traditional sources in ways never before possible.

Unlike Gist or Capsule our product is free, simple to use and easy to add new functionality.

It's not perfect, it took five minutes, it does however work really well as a base template. I'm going to pass this around the team to get everybody's take on the products that we have and see how close (or far apart) we all are.

It's that time of month again and we've just made a super lovely update to ContactZilla. A lot of the work has been under the hood.

• De-duping of contacts is hugely improved
• De-duping of auto discovered profile data is improved
• Social Connect has been renamed to "Import Contacts"
• The Import Contacts page has been redesigned
• The Flash message have been simplified
• The invite your Team light-box appears immediately after registration
• The default page after sign up is now the Import Contacts" page

When you've done an import from Twitter and LinkedIn, CZ will do its best to merge people together even though it doesn't know the email address... CZ will also do its best to "discover" any other public sites that the contact is part of, such as Flickr, Youtube, etc... 

This extended profile data works really well with the "Website Feeds" action. Displaying any content available from RSS feeds that are part of the profile data.

A big user change  (albeit a tiny technical) change is that we've renamed "social connect" to "import contacts", a bit of simple language goes a long way...

We've looked hard at the whole page and redesigned it to make it easier to see what you can do and what is happening at any given time. Under the hood the contact import process is faster and matches different networks much more efficiently.

The default landing page after sign up is now the import page allowing new users to get straight in and import their contacts in as quickly as possible.

There's also a few other hidden things going on, getting ready for our next release... Lists... Can't wait. 

Any feedback or problems please let us know.

We call our task system "QuickTask" as its quick to add tasks to most things in ContactZilla.

Adding tasks to items lets you schedule replies, assign support, or just general reminders.

You can add tasks to:

• people
• companies
• Tweets
• RSS items/websites
• Emails

You can assign tasks to team members or yourself and with a specific date in mind. The assignee will get a reminder everyday by email until the task is completed.

There are two ways to add tasks in ContactZilla...

Contact Level Tasks

The first and simplest way to add a task is located in the right hand sidebar when viewing a company or contact (this includes yourself or your company). It's located under the "Quick Task" heading.

The person that has been assigned the task will receive an email everyday reminding them of the task until it is completed. The item will also appear in their personal list of tasks.

Application Level Tasks

When you are viewing the Twitter or website feed of a contact in a profile, you will notice that you there is an "Assign" button next to each item. This button will pop up a window that will allow you to assign this particular tweet or website item as a Quick Task.

We have some interesting plans for the QuickTask application. We'are always interested in feedback on how we can improve, so please do let us know.