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Anagram Becomes Copy2Contact, Gets BlackBerry App

Simon Mackie — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:00:24 +0000

Anagram, a clever Windows app that can automatically parse text snippets for contacts, leads, appointments and tasks and capture them into your organizer or CRM software, has had its name changed to Copy2Contact. I liked the product very much when I reviewed it earlier this year.

Along with the name change, a BlackBerry app is now also available, letting you get the same functionality on your mobile device. The app costs $9.99 (BlackBerry App World link) and a 14-day free trial is available.

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Clearing the Cache: BlackBerry Edition

Scott Blitstein — Fri, 08 May 2009 16:00:25 +0000

Like many of us, I spend a lot of time on the web and come across a staggering number of interesting things. In Clearing The Cache I pull out some of my favorites and share them with you here.

Need to get your music fix? Try Pandora for BlackBerry or Slacker for BlackBerry; both offer outstanding radio services.

Last week I wrote a brief snippet about gwabbit for BlackBerry as a means to easily capture contact info from your emails, but you may want to also take a look at Anagram’s BlackBerry offering as well.

Spend a lot of time on your BlackBerry? Our friends atjkOnTheRun can help you find out if you affinity has reached the level of addiction.

SimpleHelp offers up a step-by-step tutorial on how to set up Google Sync for Blackberry.

Finally, I just love Nicholas Bate and his hilarious ongoing series of posts documenting the species known as Homo Berriens:

“Accentuated fingers enable small keyboards to be adroitly managed at speed while simultaneously executing other activities such as eating cereal, walking the dog or sky-diving.”

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gwabbit Brings Its Contact Capture to the BlackBerry

Scott Blitstein — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:00:16 +0000

Having complete and accurate contact information for the folks you communicate with is an important, but often neglected, practice. Oftentimes, the details we need are included in our email communication, but the process of capturing that information is difficult or time-consuming.

Automatic text parsing of emails to make this process easier is becoming more common, though. On the desktop side of things we have the gwabbit for Outlook application we looked at back in March, which got mixed reviews from us. In my testing I thought it worked well, while Simon preferred Anagram, which offers similar functionality.

Not being a regular Outlook user, though, gwabbit offered little long-term value for me, and I imagine quite a few of us use web-based tools for our CRM needs.

The folks behind gwabbit are hoping to ease our pain by bringing their offering to the mobile platform, beginning with gwabbit for Blackberry, which they announced today at WES 2009.

gwabbit for BlackBerry brings the same single-click identifying process to your mobile where you can then use the inherent sync capabilities of the device to get this information into your contact manager of choice.

The application will be available from Blackberry App World on May 25 and will cost $9.95 annually.

How do you capture you contact info?

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Anagram Captures Useful Data From Text Snippets

Simon Mackie — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:00:21 +0000

Last week ,we reviewed gwabbit, an app that aims to automatically pull contact data from emails in Outlook. Scott Blitstein was positive about gwabbit, but it didn’t work as well for me when I tried it: sometimes it was unable to extract my contact data, even though it was cleanly presented in the email’s signature block.

I really like the idea of being able to extract that useful information without having to manually copy and paste, though, so when Nicholas Maddix of Textual emailed me to tell me about Anagram, a similar Windows app, and it was also recommended by a couple of commenters on our gwabbit review, I thought I’d check it out.

Anagram is like gwabbit in that you can use it to extract contact data from emails. However, it’s more flexible, in that you can use it to capture information from any text, not just emails, and it’s not restricted to contacts: Anagram will examine any text you throw at it and automatically attempt to capture calendar events, to-do items and notes, too. Here’s a quick screencast of it in action capturing some contact data and adding a calendar event to Outlook:

WebWorkerDaily Screencast: Anagram from Simon Mackie on Vimeo.

Unlike gwabbit, Anagram is not limited to Outlook. It can work with a variety of different target applications:

Microsoft Outlook
Salesforce.com
Jigsaw
Palm Desktop/Agendus
NetSuite

Anagram works very well and it’s very easy to use, too. You activate Anagram by highlighting your target text snippet (this can be in an email, on a web site or in a document), then hitting a hotkey combination. By default, the hotkey is tapping ctrl-c quickly twice in succession, which I think feels very natural, but you can change it to a function key if you prefer. Anagram parses the text, figures out what type of information the text contains, launches the target app (if it’s not already open) and populates the fields automatically. All you have to do is check that the information is correct and save the data. In my tests, it was very accurate with little to no manual intervention required. Anagram is a simple app, but if you use one of its target applications and find copying and pasting contact information a chore, it’s definitely worth a try.

Anagram is Windows-only and available as a free 45-day trial. After that, pricing depends on usage and will cost $34.95 for Anagram Personal or $74.95 per year for Anagram CRM.

Do you use Anagram or a similar app?

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