Bangladesh gets Hip with HipCal

Just when I thought that the HipCal team's 5 minutes of fame had come to an end, I received a frantic call from my Mom this morning letting me know otherwise.

The Daily Ittefaq, a nationally published newspaper in Bangladesh, featured an article about the HipCal team. We’re not sure if this publicity for HipCal and Plaxo will cause Bangladesh to leap forward in Plaxo’s “Connected Index” or perhaps win the next “World Cup of Address Books”, but as a Bangladeshi native, this is truly an honor.

My Bangla is a little rusty, but it does seem to be a positive article; I’m still waiting for the translation to come in from Mom.

The HipCal Team at Plaxo

Time seems to go a lot faster after college ends. It’s been nearly six months here at Plaxo, and we’ve been hard at work building a brand new calendar (among other things). We’re all really excited and are counting down to the day when we can show it all to you.

We've updated our collection with new holiday eCard designs for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year's Day and other season's greetings. Whether it's a cute, funny, heartwarming or loving message you want to send, you'll find it in our site. With just a few clicks, you can finally make good on that resolution to send out holiday greetings.

We've also updated our eCard borders with holiday designs; now you can personalize your eCard with snowflakes, reindeer, wrapped giftboxes and more. Here's a few samples to give you some ideas:

If you have our Outlook toolbar plugin, you'll see one of the following reminders to send your holiday eCards:

Or you can just visit our holiday eCards page directly.

Although it doesn't snow in Silicon Valley, holiday indications are all over our Plaxo office, from the animatronic dancing snowman in the lobby to the endless boxes and trays of holiday cookies and chocolates. With Hanukkah already started and just over a week till Christmas and Kwanzaa, it's apparent we've entered holiday crunch time. End of the year deadlines, travel plans, shopping, cooking, entertaining (and sometimes enduring) -- it can take the holiday wind out of anyone's sails.

The holidays can be stressful, hard on the waistline and the wallet. However, it's also the time we use to gather with family and loved ones, share meals and presents and rekindle relationships with long lost friends, relatives and colleagues.

I'm lucky enough to work on a product that I actually find useful and which is also part of my day-to-day life. For example, my family members would consider it fortunate to get one greeting card in the mail from me every 3 or so years. It's not that I don't love my family, but I'm just terrible at these kinds of things. And if that's what my family expects, you can imagine what friends, former co-workers and acquaintances can look forward to -- not much. That's what makes Plaxo eCards great for someone like me - I get reminded to send cards and I can queue cards up ahead of time or even the day of.

Good luck surviving the holiday crunch, and have a safe and happy holiday!

-- Hong Kwon, eCards product manager

Plaxo's Joseph Smarr will be at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) this Mon-Wed at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. If you're attending the workshop, come by and say hi!

At Plaxo, we're always looking for new and better ways to help our users access and sync their contact and calendar data across the sites, apps, and services that they use on a daily basis. The status quo is that every new service we want to sync with requires our users to enter a new login/password and requires Plaxo to implement a new authentication and data access scheme. Clearly this does not scale well. We look forward to the day when users can authenticate once, perhaps using something like OpenID 2.0, and then immediately connect Plaxo to a host of services--many of which we've never even heard of before--and the authorization and data access will be automatic, transparent, and secure, because of the open standards and protocols being used.

The technologies being discussed at the IIW (including OpenID, Sxip, Liberty, and more) are the most promising developments towards this vision, and we're excited to share our ideas and real-world challenges in support of this important work.