Effortless personal contact management has been the promise of countless web services for years — Etacts, Gist and Plaxo come to mind — and yet most of us still manually manage our disparate contact databases and address books, which is almost always a messy process.
Perhaps Connected can get us back on track. “The main goal of the product is to help you build, maintain and leverage your relationships,” says founder and CEO Sachin Rekhi.
The web- and mobile-friendly application hooks into nearly every social network, contact database and calendar repository on the web to automatically build out a comprehensive contact and company database, free of duplicate entries.
In Connected’s perspective, your contact database includes everyone you email via Gmail or Outlook, the people you’ve scheduled meetings with via Google Calendar, and the folks you call and text via Google Voice. It also extends to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Evernote and so forth, connecting the dots between communications — email, Twitter DMs, @mentions, Facebook messages, contacts tagged in Evernote notes et al. — across all these services to build a real-time conversation history for each contact.
Connected’s higher calling is to eliminate the manual contact entry that other services mandate and to help you better mange your professional network without the management.
“Really good sales people spend a lot of time managing and building their professional networks,” says Rekhi. “Connected is a next generation contact management solution that helps the rest of us be much more efficient.”
Even with its most basic features, Connected seems sexy; but we’ve barely scratched the surface of what the app can do. Connected will email you each morning, for instance, with a daily agenda that not only includes your appointments but any relevant social and/or news items on your contacts or their companies.
Connected comes with a rather substantial (at least for personal use) monthly financial commitment. You can access the produce free of charge for a 14 day trial period, but afterwards you’ll need to pay $9.99 per month to maintain access.
Speaking in Delhi, India, to an industry group last week, Ballmer said, “We’re pushing hard in the productivity space. We’ll launch our Office 365 cloud service, which gives you Lync and Exchange and SharePoint and Office and more as a subscribable service that comes from the cloud. That launches in the month of June.”
