Looking Ahead

This is my first post on the Plaxo blog. As Ben just announced, I’m stepping up to lead the company, with responsibility across our two business units, the highly visible Plaxo.com and the less visible, but no less important, Social Technologies Group, which is bringing social capabilities to a growing list of Comcast services.
I’m very excited about this opportunity, because we have an amazing team and the market conditions are becoming ever more favorable to our mission. Though our product has evolved quite a bit over the last eight years, our vision has never been more relevant than now. Why is that?
Before the rise of social networks, Plaxo set out to solve the vexing problem of address book decay and fragmentation. The founding team sought to use network effects to create an address book that would keep itself up-to-date – and which, rather than being another data silo, interoperated with the important tools and services in your life, like Microsoft Outlook. Ironically, as the web has gone more social and more mobile, the contacts management problem has become even more acute. Now, when you need someone’s contact info, you have more places to look than ever, with no way to know which piece of data is the most current.
Since I joined the company last year as General Manager of Plaxo.com, we have narrowed our focus and renewed our commitment to solving this problem. Plaxo.com’s mission for 2010 (and beyond) is to deliver the market-leading “truly smart, socially-aware, and pervasive” address book. We’re closer to that goal than anyone, but there’s a lot of really exciting work ahead of us.
The same is true for our Social Technologies Group (STG), formed during the acquisition of Plaxo by Comcast. The STG team is a center for excellence built around Plaxo’s core competencies in address book, calendar, Social Web, and interoperability. STG is involved in a wide variety of projects at the crossroads of social and entertainment across Comcast.
Oh, and if this sounds as exciting to you as it does to me, drop me a line, because we’re hiring!
Justin Miller
President and CEO