Addressbook As A Platform, The Way A Contact Manager Should Be

I always felt that the address book or contact manager I have on any
internet enabled device is very primitive. Even in this era of mashups
and APIs, our web based address books and the ones on our
smart(dumb?)phones are no different from the rolodex we had decades
back. If I couldn’t get any additional value from the address books on
my internet enabled devices, why would I want to spend money on those
devices and the associated data plans. I could just use the only thing
left by my grandpa in his will for me, his old rolodex, and save some
green. I don’t want a rolodex but I want a platform for my contacts
(with due apologies to Ben Kepes for using the term)

Gist (See Cloud Ave posts here, here and here)
attempted to solve the problem. Though they have done a great job in
bringing together all the information together, I have a feeling that
it is adding to the information overload rather than help tackling it.
Based on my basic understanding of the app, I think it takes all
contacts from all the social networks and mashes up to offer
information about each of them. I really don’t want something like
that. It loads me up with information about people whom I might follow
on Twitter or Facebook for various reasons but don’t want to be part of
my contact manager. It is a clear case of information overload as far
as I am concerned. What I actually want is more information about
people I care, taken from these social networking sites.

Enter Asurion Mobile Addressbook from Asurion Mobile Applications, a privately held and wholly owned business unit of Asurion, Inc.,
a provider of white label mobile backup services. This is how an
addressbook or contact manager should be in the first place. In this
era of big data, where the user data still resides on silos at various
distributed applications and platforms, we badly need something that
could consolidate the data and offer an unified, comprehensive and
intelligent information that will add tremendous value to our daily
life. Asurion Mobile Addressbook is a solution that offers just that
kind of information for us. Their main focus is on user experience.
They observed it by working with mobile operators and by spending time
talking to end users. Based on the feedback they received, they came up
with this app that enhances the user experience.

This
is a socially connected addressbook first released for Android phones.
It is available as a free download from today. It will be available as
an app for Android marketed directly to consumers. They are also
licensing to mobile operators so that this app replaces the address
book on their phones. They have signed up with one big mobile operator
to be the provider of address books on their phones but they are not
willing to share any more info at this point. The app has a real
integration with the workflow of the users’ address book and brings
social content directly to their communication workflow. It takes a
people centric view and helps users find information about anyone from
their contact list.

Along with adding social
aspect to the addressbook, there is also a business aspect to the user
experience called Smart Contacts. With this, users have the ability to
look up a business, say Starbucks, and, then, when an user checks that
contact again anytime, it shows the nearest Starbucks locations.
Asurion also has plans to offer value added services based on the Smart
Contacts. In fact, Smart Contacts is part of their plans for
monetization.

Another key feature of the
addressbook are the Mixins which gives users a choice of the content
and services they want to build to get a complete view of their
relationships and drive their personal communications. Social
networking feeds, photos, videos, games and more can be added directly
into the contact views of the address book. Think of Mixins as apps on
top of addressbook platform. They have eight official Mixins available
now. These Mixins can be developed by third party developers by
accessing the open framework made available to them by Asurion. The
open framework makes it easy for the developers in such a way that they
can easily port their existing applications without any complete
rewrite.

One of the interesting feature of
addressbook is the ability to automatically match the contacts in the
phone’s addressbook with the contacts on various social networking
sites. The automatic matching works pretty well and, in the rare
instances where it doesn’t match well, there is an option to match
manually. This access is also given to third party developers of Mixins
so that they can take advantage of this matching on their apps. Yet
another feature is the instant notifications from these social
networking sites. It enables users to view updates from all of their
social networks even before they open their address book via the
Android notification screen. Users can customize the frequency and
content of alerts to include different types of updates, from new
photos on Facebook to new followers on Twitter.

I
asked them about how useful it will be for the users. According to
them, based the data from beta testing, they find that people use the
addressbook for an average of 20 minutes a day. Compare it with the
usage of FB on desktop which is 27 ins a day. This is a very good level
of engagement by the users and offers many opportunities to monetize at
a later stage.



Since they were touting about the openness of their framework, I asked
them about the data portability. It appears the data can be exported to
CSV file and can be synced to Google contacts. Depending on the mobile
platform, they will allow an option to sync data with the associated
service. For example, in the case of iPhone, it could be Mobile Me.



As I told in the beginning of this post, Addressbook by Asurion Mobile
Applications is the way an address book should be. A central platform
from which the users can interact, socialize and, even, do business
with their contacts. I saw their demo and I am really impressed by the
potential of this app. I am just waiting for the release of an iPhone
app or the day I can buy an Android phone and use this app. 

Related Posts:

• Android Phones Get A Social Addressbook