A friend of mine, Paul Freet, launched a new online service this past spring (April of 2007 to be exact.) Its name is Big Contacts and it can be found at http://www.bigcontacts.com. I think Paul has created one of the best user interfaces I've seen in some time (for an online service.). He makes great use of Ajax to let a user do many things without having to refresh the browser. He also users colors and shadowing to present a fantastic effect making everything easy on the eyes. Not to mention the contact manager functionality is a must have for business people who have large numbers of customers and prospects. The service also provide group functions such as team calendaring and team opportunity tracking.
Please let me know what you think. I think this could be the next big online productivity application to challenge the likes of salesforce.com and a prime contender to take the market away from Act! and Goldmine. Not to mention Paul's ability to craft other similar applications from this base.
Back in the day, there were many productivity applications companies based right here in Atlanta. Samna, Peachtree and Zsoft were stars before the Internet took off. Since that time, most software vendors in this town have focused on enterprise security. Even the venture capitalists here haven't been too interested in diversity in their portfolios.
I even tried to launch a company around a presentation creation application a buddy of mine and I created. Folks here just weren't interested (and without an Angel investor, a full VC or a big payout in the past, it's hard to get a technology business off the ground; and I haven't had the big payout yet.) Another friend of mine started a company here called vFlyer. vFlyer helps users create compelling flyers and then either download PDFs of those flyers or instantly post them to a number of marketing sites (such as craigslist.) He had to take the company to San Francisco and launch it from there. He's doing well now. Go look at it here.
Please take the time to look at Big Contacts. I personally think it's a Big Winner!
