San Francisco, CA – August 31, 2009 – gwabbit, LLC, the only provider of automatic email contact management (ECM) solutions for the contact cloud today announced that the company has achieved profitability only six months after its product launch at DEMO ’09.

“In these challenging economic times, it is an impressive achievement to bring a technology start-up to profitability in such a short period,” said Chris Shipley, chairman and CEO, Guidewire Group. “To do it without the benefit of outside venture capital is remarkable. gwabbit is a strong proof point that priced software remains a viable—and perhaps most viable—business model.”

gwabbit launched its flagship product, gwabbit for Outlook, at DEMO ’09 in March, winning a DEMOgod award, the highest honor bestowed by the nation’s premier technology conference for launching startup companies. gwabbit followed up in May with the launch of its first mobile product, gwabbit for BlackBerry. The gwabbit products use semantic technology to automatically scan incoming emails, identify and grab embedded contact information, and import it into the user’s address book with one click. gwabbit has garnered both industry and user acclaim.

“By achieving profitability in such a brief time, without the benefit of venture capital, gwabbit is demonstrating a new paradigm for technology start-ups for the new economy, with a focus on efficiency and productivity,” said Todd Miller, president and founder of gwabbit. “Companies can be successfully launched and grown without millions in venture investments and years of losses.”

Miller attributes gwabbit’s rapid ascent to profitability to a combination of solid user-intuitive product offerings, a back-to-basics revenue model, and lean and mean business practices, such as virtual officing. Miller is pioneer in virtual officing, launching one of the world’s first successful 100% virtual companies, WebFeat, in 1998.

Pricing and Availability

gwabbit for Outlook is available for a one-time charge of $19.95 at www.gwabbit.com. Both products are available for a free 14-day/20-contact trial. gwabbit for BlackBerry downloads in less than a minute on BlackBerry smartphones and is available for only $9.99 annually on BlackBerry App World (www.blackberry.com/appworld), as well as online at www.gwabbit.com. gwabbit is available for all BlackBerry smartphones including the BlackBerry® Bold™, BlackBerry® Storm™, BlackBerry® Curve™ series and BlackBerry® Pearl™ series of smartphones.

About gwabbit, LLC

Founded in 2008 gwabbit (formerly Technicopia, LLC) is the only provider of applications designed to automatically feed the contact cloud. Its flagship product gwabbit grabs contact information embedded in emails and automatically updates or creates new contact files. Recipient of the DEMO 09 DEMOgod awards, gwabbit for Outlook and gwabbit for BlackBerry are the fastest ways to capture and manage contacts on a mobile device or desktop. Whether you are on the road or at the desk, gwabbit delivers Email Contact Management (ECM) solutions that boost productivity and increase your competitive edge. For more information or to purchase gwabbit, visit www.gwabbit.com.

News AppWorld, BlackBerry, Contact Cloud, Demo09, Email Contact Management, outlook, virtual office

Based on customer questions and our own experience, we thought you might find these tips and tricks helpful in your daily gwabbing…

gwab control

On the gwabbit toolbar, you will find an “Options” button. Under Options are several tabs which allow you to set preferences and find information about gwabbit.

• The General tab allows you to make selections for your preference about certain aspects of the product’s behavior. For instance, you can choose to have the gwabbit alert pop-up with every email, or only when the contact is not in your address book or contains updated information. You can also choose whether or not to have gwabbit prompt you to “Improve Results” if gwabbit was unable to locate a full signature block from which to gwab the contact information. In an upcoming version of the product, you will also be able to configure your toolbar to remove the “Tell a Friend” button.
• The License tab contains your license key and the email address of the recognized user of the product.
• The Upgrade tab tells you what version of the product you have installed and allows you to check whether an upgrade is available. You can also choose whether to have the product alert you when an upgrade is available by checking the notification box.
• The About tab tells you the version of gwabbit installed and provides a link to the website.

The “gwabbit” button on the toolbar allows you to manually launch gwabbit to capture a contact.

License to gwab

A valid license key for gwabbit contains 30 alpha characters, 6 groups of 5 letters. The license key for a trial of gwabbit will start with “MBMUG”. The license key is tied to the email address you enter when starting a trial or making a purchase of gwabbit.  If you still see the “purchase now” button on the toolbar after paying for gwabbit, or you get an error message stating that there is an invalid email or license key, check this tab on your toolbar. If the license key entered there starts with MBMUG, or is not a 30 character string of only alpha characters, contact Customer Support at support@gwabbit.com for assistance.

Doing the double gwab

Want to use gwabbit on more than one PC? If you want to use gwabbit on multiple computers, you can do so with one license, as long as you are using the same email address for Outlook on those computers. If you use different email addresses you will need a license for each. You can get a license for a second email address at a discount, just contact Sales at sales@gwabbit.com.

Show me the gwab!

Why is the “Display As” field in the address book not being filled in by gwabbit? Many customers have asked why this field is not populated when the contact information is gwabbed. The “Display As” field is not populated by gwabbit, but is populated by Outlook, as a default, based on the information entered in the contact name fields when the contact is created. So you will not see it populate when the contact is created, but it should be populated when you go back to the contact later.

Which way did he gwab, which way did he gwab?

Are your contact names being saved in the wrong order (first name/last name vs. last name/first name)?  The order in which contacts are saved is a function of Outlook itself. To set your options in Outlook, select Options from the Tools menu, then in the Preference Tab select Contact Options. Here you can set your preferences for name and filing options for new contacts. You can choose the Default “Full Name” order and the Default “File As” order as they work best for you.

You can try the following in order to get your contacts filed by last name. Under the selection Default “Full Name” try switching to [First (Middle) Last] from [Last First]. You can keep the Default “File As” Order as [Last, First]. If this particular setup does not suit your needs, you can adjust these preferences in the way that works best for you.

How’s it gwabbin’?

Are you familiar with the Improve Results feature in gwabbit for Outlook? If gwabbit does not gwab a contact completely, or misidentifies some of the information in the signature block, you can click on “Improve Results” from the gwabbit toolbar. This allows you to highlight the signature block to help gwabbit identify the contact information for addition to your address book. You can also manually update any field as needed.

If gwabbit does not pick up all of the contact information or something was incorrect, we invite you to tell us about it. Click on the Submit Feedback button from the gwabbit toolbar when you have an email or your address book open to capture a contact. This will open a new window with your email address and a field where you can add a few words about what was missed. When you submit this, it sends the target contact to our developers and to Customer Support. We analyze and track all submissions, and use them to help us improve gwabbit. (We want gwabbit to be weally gweat!) Free upgrades of the product are planned to address these issues and improve the quality of gwabbit’s contact recognition capabilities. Oh, and you can also let us know when gwabbit did a good job!

Get more for your gwabbit

Want to gwab contact information from an email thread? By default, gwabbit is built to pick up the contact information of the sender. However, if you want to gwab contact information from another person within an email thread, use the Improve Results button. You can then highlight the signature block of a person further down the email thread so that gwabbit can pick up that contact information for you to save to your address book. You should note however, that if that signature block does not contain an email address, gwabbit will by default populate the senders email address into that field. So you should watch for that and manually update the email address before saving the contact. This trick may not work 100% of the time since gwabbit is not actually coded to handle contacts other than the sender, but it should help in many cases.

Still a little gwarbled?

Check out our FAQ http://www.gwabbit.com/faqs.php and our Support Blog http://www.getsatisfaction.com/gwabbit, or contact Customer Support by email: support@gwabbit.com or by phone: 1-888-gwabbit (1-888-492-2248, x2).

Features email, gwabbit, Microsoft Outlook, outlook

This is an interview with gwabbit President & Founder Todd Miller, in which he discusses gwabbit, its origins, and its future direction

News BlackBerry, Contact Cloud, demo, DEMOgod, email, gwabbit, iPhone, Microsoft Outlook, outlook

This is gwabbit President & Founder Todd Miller’s presentation at DEMO ‘09. gwabbit received the prestigious DEMOgod award, the highest honor bestowed by the nation’s premier technology conference for launching startup companies. See the presentation that started it all!

News BlackBerry, demo, DEMOgod, gwabbit, outlook