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gwabbit Offers Free Version of Its Blackberry App

Scott Blitstein — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:00:20 +0000

gwabbit is a handy application that automatically identifies and parses contact information from your emails to help ease the process of creating new entries in your contact list. I’ve written about the Outlook version as well as the paid BlackBerry edition in the past and was impressed by the offering.

The team at gwabbit recently released a free version of the BlackBerry app. It offers the same functionality as the paid version, except that it automatically notifies the folks whose addresses you’ve grabbed via email. I’m not usually a huge fan of this sort of thing, but it could be useful to let people know you’re trying to keep in touch with them. Personally, I think I would spend the $9.99 annually and spring for the paid version. The time savings make it a no-brainer, as does the knowledge that you’re not bugging your friends, clients and contacts.

You can download gwabbit (both free and paid editions) at the BlackBerry App World.

Would gwabbit Free help you keep your contacts in order?

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gwabbit Gives Away the "Gift of gwab"

Scott Blitstein — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:29 +0000

I’ve written in the past about both gwabbit and gwabbit for BlackBerry, nifty tools designed to help you capture and create contacts from within Outlook or on your BlackBerry device.

It turns out the folks at gwabbit are having a contest. I know I am always interested in the chance to win free stuff, particularly when the prize is a Flip MinoHD video camera, an oft-mentioned device here on WebWorkerDaily.

The contest is simple — the five folks who get the most friends to try gwabbit win the big prize. I don’t recommend spamming your friends and social-networking sites just for the sake of winning, but if you have some friends who might benefit from gwabbit, or are willing to help you out, this custom Flip cam is a nice prize.

Get full contest details to learn how to enter and win.

Does gwabbit help you with your contacts? What would you do with a Flip MinoHD?

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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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Capture Your Outlook Contacts With gwabbit

Scott Blitstein — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:30:05 +0000

I’m often surprised by the number of people who use Microsoft Outlook as their primary email and information manager who don’t also take full advantage of its contact capabilities. While I wouldn’t say it compares with a full blown CRM system, it is certainly a capable program for maintaining contact information.

I think the main reason for this lack of adoption is that the process for capturing and maintaining this supplemental information in Outlook is just too tedious. The information you need is likely included in all those email signatures, but it takes a lot of cutting and pasting to parse it out and place it in to the proper fields.

Enter gwabbit – an Outlook plug-in, launched today at DEMO, that makes this process ridiculously easy.

The idea is simple really. Gwabbit runs in the background, scanning your email and alerting you if it finds new contact information within. A single click of the gwabbit button and it creates (or updates) a contact record with the info it gathers.

The update functionality is particularly handy, as it can let you know when the information you have is out-of-date or incorrect.

I’ve been playing around with gwabbit for about a week now and it generally works as advertised. Depending on how your contacts arrange their information, it can occasionally get confused but it was always easier to clean up than it would have been to start from scratch. If it finds ambiguous or incomplete information, it will also prompt you to clean it up or correct it. Highlighting the signature block can help point it to the right place.

The notifications can initially be overwhelming, so it’s good that you can configure them. I ended up turning off all prompts and just using it manually to capture information a bit more selectively. It was really quite easy to go through my email archives and quickly build up a contact list.

Obviously, once this information is stored in Outlook it’s easy to sync to a multitude of mobile devices or export for use in your CRM.

gwabbit isn’t a life-changing application by any means, but if Outlook is the hub of your communication and contact info, it is a handy way to automate something you’re already doing, or should be doing, pretty regularly.

gwabbit is obviously Windows-only but it does support a myriad of Outlook versions from 2000 up to the current Outlook 2007.

A downloadable 14-day trial is available that you can use for up to 20 contacts, above which it will cost $19.95.

Do you use Outlook to maintain your contacts? How complete is the information you keep?

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