contacts

Add your Facebook friends to Outlook and Gmail--sort of

We can all be thankful Facebook doesn't let you export your friends' e-mail addresses and telephone numbers. The export prohibition doesn't extend to other information about your friends, however. A new free service puts this data in a .csv file you can import to your Outlook and Gmail contacts. Unfortunately, the results leave much to be desired.

Export Friends to .csv wasn't developed by Facebook, but rather by J?rn Arild Anden?s. You can choose to export up to 11 different categories of information about your friends, including Facebook ID, name (full, first, and last), profile … Read more

Invoice simplifier

Simply Invoice provides purchase orders and quotes in addition to its namesake function, producing high-quality invoices quickly and easily. Behind its cluttered layout hides a useful program for entrepreneurs and small-business owners.

The program's interface requires more patience than we expected, since its layout overflows with foreign-looking command icons. Fortunately, there's enough onscreen direction to keep most users in control. Creating a new invoice takes mere minutes, once you understand the layout. We set up our company's profile, including name, logo, and taxes, and Simply Invoice automatically populated our documents with the appropriate information in the appropriate … Read more

Gmail's contact manager now de-dupes en masse

Gmail on Tuesday introduced a new feature that lets users remove every single duplicate contact entry at once. Previously, users had to go through their address book one at a time--a process that could be both tedious and time-consuming.

The new system runs a simple scan on your contacts, and provides a one-button solution that will merge the information for each contact. This is a non-destructive method, and the same that's carried out each time you run the normal duplicate checker. Contacts with multiple e-mail addresses just show up as the same contact in Gmail's auto-complete suggestions.

Google … Read more

Nio prevents lost or stolen phones, laptops, kids

In addition to letting loose a string of expletives, those who have lost a phone or been a victim of phone thievery have probably reacted with the following: "Nooooo! My contacts!"

Mobile innovator Tenbu Technologies has come up with Nio, a Bluetooth security tag that links to any of your belongings. If your laptop, phone, keys, or even child move out of range, an alarm sounds.

The gadget has the potential to save your items and the valuable information they carry, like contacts.

How exactly does it work? Attach Nio to your keys, laptop bag, or other belonging … Read more

Free Gwabbit for BlackBerry on the horizon

Good news for BlackBerry business users who are pinching pennies: a free version of the Gwabbit contact manager for BlackBerry is expected to surface in the BlackBerry App World--and only in the App World--on Tuesday, December 8. The current version of Gwabbit for BlackBerry costs $9.99 for a yearlong subscription.

Gwabbit (formerly Technicopia) came out with Gwabbit the BlackBerry app back in May 2009, as the mobile version of its Outlook e-mail add-on. Gwabbit scans incoming e-mail for a signature block. If it finds one, the software compares the contents to your address book contacts. If there's no previous match, or if it looks like there's been a change, Gwabbit will prompt you to add or update the contact.

We were impressed with the convenience Gwabbit gives business users who build up their contact lists from their smartphones. Moreover, we noted how effectively and quickly Gwabbit processed the e-mails, but only so long as the sender's contact details are conveniently organized in the signature block. Gwabbit lacks the sensitivity to pull possibly relevant details from elsewhere in the e-mail.

How could Gwabbit's publisher give away its $10-a-year product for free?… Read more

iPhone app turns business cards into contacts

We live in a digital age, so why do business cards refuse to die? They're a hassle to store and an environmental suck to produce. Plus, who among us has time to manually transcribe contact info into a phone, PDA, or PC?

Needless to say, I was geeked to try Business Card Reader, a $5.99 app that turns business cards into iPhone Address Book entries.

Specifically, BCR leverages your iPhone's camera to take a snapshot of a card, then uses built-in optical character recognition (OCR) to convert the image into text and populate the appropriate contact fields.… Read more

I wear my suncontacts at night

Photochromic lenses that allow you to walk from inside to outside without putting on UV-filtering lenses have been around for decades. But the technology is just making its way to contacts.

Traditionally, these light-to-dark lenses have been constructed by coating a normal lens with a photochromic dye. When UV light hits the dye, the individual molecules expand, darkening the lens and absorbing light. Coating contacts, however, doesn't work so well.

So researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore have laced contacts with a matrix on nano tunnels filled with these photochromic dyes. Not only has the … Read more

Organized? Totally

Personal Information Managers are among the most useful kinds of software available. They can bring order to chaotic lives or help even the most organized among us wring extra time out of their busy schedules. Total Organizer is a free PIM from Konrad Papula that has some features that set it apart from the crowded PIM scene, chief among them its tree view method of organizing your tasks into folders, called "tags." These tags can belong to any number of other folders simultaneously, and it's all cross-referenced for easy searching and task conversion.

Like most PIMs, Total … Read more

iTunes Basics: Sync your Google contacts with your iPhone or iPod touch address book

Using iTunes 7.7 or greater, users can sync their Google contacts to their iPhone or iPod touch address book using these simple steps. Before syncing, users should organize their contact lists on their Mac, iPhone or iPod touch, and in Google to ensure a smoother transfer. Once you are organized (including having at least iTunes 7.7 installed on your Mac), connect your iPhone or iPod touch and...… Read more