Spanning Sync Passes 20,000 Paid Subscribers

Today Spanning Sync passed 20,000 paid subscribers, which for us is a humbling milestone.

When Larry and I started working on this service, we estimated that maybe a thousand people would agree with us that iCal and Google Calendar should be made to work better together. Apparently we underestimated.

So thank you to every one of our 20,000 customers! If any of you are at WWDC and see someone wearing a Spanning Sync t-shirt, that's me—please come say hello. I'd love to be able to thank you in person for supporting Spanning Sync.

But of course we're not done yet. We're working hard every day to make our service even more valuable than it was when you paid for it.

In the coming weeks we'll launch Spanning Sync v2.0 (currently in beta), which also syncs Address Book with Gmail and Google Apps. And we have another announcement in store—something we're incredibly excited about—but that one will have to wait a bit longer.

Thanks,
Charlie

Comments

[Al Sargent]

As cool as sync is, it would be great if there were a way "scrub" my Address Book and Gmail Contacts. That is:

0. Combine contacts with the same name. (Provide a way to override this for the few "John Smiths" -- people who share the same name.)
1. Remove any duplicate phone numbers/emails/addresses
2. Move email addresses out of phone number fields, and vice versa
3. Add zip codes to addresses
4. Infer Web site from email address (john@acme.com --> Web site = www.acme.com)
5. Infer country from city/state
6. Infer state from zip code
7. Generate directions to and from my home address and office address (put them into notes field)
8. Generate nearest cross street from address
9. Infer zip+4 from address

... and probably other things that I'm missing.

Granted, Address Book does #0 and #1 above, but still seems to leave repeats around for some reason.

These scrubbing features would be great to see on the Spanning Sync roadmap.

My two cents...

[Charlie Wood]

Al-

Thanks for the excellent suggestions! Once we get contact sync nailed down we'll certainly look at adding extended functionality like this.

Thanks,
Charlie

[Al Sargent]

That's great, thank you. And congratulations on your recent subscriber milestone! I'm glad to hear that your business is doing well -- with Apple announcing that they're going to focus on MobileMe, there's going to be a continued need for Mac/Google synchronization services.