Zyb signals intent to socialise mobile address books
I’ve been sitting watching the developments of Zyb for a long time now, ever since the hit the public airwaves. With millions of contacts now under management and with a clear strategy of offering a simple, easy address-backup service that gets folks in the door, I was looking to see what they’d do next.
Well here’s a sneak peak. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll have got a note about their ‘Q2 2008’ social phonebook. That can’t be far away now.
I’ve got some details for you. I’m going to publish their words:
The mobile address book is the feature on the phone that we use most often and is where most people store the contact information of the most important people in their lives – family, friends and close business colleagues. Yet, there has been no innovation around the mobile address book in over a decade. In fact, let’s be honest, whilst we’ve been able to interact with friends on the internet in ever more innovative ways, the mobile phone address book has remained a pretty dull and static experience. We want to change this.
Very exciting, eh?
Our developers have therefore been working hard on a new service that will transform our experience of our mobile phone address book – into a live and interactive experience of your contacts. The new service is called the ZYB Phonebook and we’re really excited about being able to share it with you in Q2 2008.
Here’s some screenshots:
Now let’s get into some nuts and bolts:
The ZYB Phonebook will, for example, enable you to:
* see the live physical location of your friends – if they want to share it with you!
* see their availability for a call including the time zone they are in if it’s a different time zone to yours – so you don’t wake them up in New York
* share your calendar with people – if you’re maybe working together at a conference for a week
* receive their online activity streams from services like Facebook and Twitter – getting the latest status of your closest friends whilst you’re away from your computer
* see the photos they have just posted on photo sharing sites like Flickr
* and of course, for the nearly quarter of a million of you who are already using ZYB, continue to receive auto-updates of your friends’ contact details as well as an online back up on zyb.com of all of the contacts, calendar events, photos and text messages on your mobile – so if you lose or change your mobile, you haven’t lost your most valuable data
Well that’s going to be very interesting, isn’t it? It looks to me to be an application, not a mobile web based service… it’s well placed to garner significant attention, not least from a wide variety of players with an interest in this space.
It’ll be free to download and it’ll work on most Nokia and Sony Ericssons from the get-go. Bring it on…
More news when I have it! For now, get yourself signed up on Zyb…
