We awoke this morning to find a great story on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle about Lunch 2.0! The article mentions Plaxo's involvement in Lunch 2.0's nascency, including the saga of hiring Mark Jen (who turned out to be as good at designing products as he was at getting free lunch).

The most recent Lunch 2.0 was hosted by our long-time friends—and new neighbors—at LinkedIn; it's hard to think of a more fitting place to do some web 2.0 networking! Come to think of it, it's been a while since Plaxo hosted one of these events. We just might have to do something about that...say sometime in July... ;)

All Plaxo members have at least one thing in common: we care a great deal about our contacts and our address book. It's our lifeline, a direct representation of the relationships (both business and personal) that we have put years of time and effort into.

Yesterday, we launched our Automated Backup and Recovery feature. It creates automatic backups of your Address Book data and let's you restore your Address Book in the event disaster strikes.

Lost your laptop? Hard Drive died? Maybe you accidentally deleted all your contacts; Backup and Recovery will help you restore your address book to various points in time up to 90 days back.

This has been something a lot of our users have been requesting for our Premium Suite (other popular requests include Gmail, and Google Calendar sync, both of which are currently in Beta).

If you are a Premium member, Automated Backup has already been turned on for you. If you don't have it yet, don't wait till it's too late, sign up here.

-- Tawheed, Product Manager

As a result of the recent announcement of our partnership with Comcast, a few of us made the trek to the granddaddy of cable shows - The Cable Show ’07 - to learn a little more about the industry we’re working with and to meet the players. It’s put on by NCTA, The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, which was founded in 1952. Ok, so Web 2.0 is the new kid on the block, and cable's been around the block, but who says they can't have fun together?

And where's the best place in the country to get together when you're getting together? Vegas, baby!

This year, the conference is hosted at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. The exhibit floor mirrors the tv guide – over here WealthTV with a red-hot Ferrari and a dapper Latin gentleman who has been rolling cigars for 36 years and who once was the fastest cigar roller in the world, individually hand wrapping cigars and expertly putting on the finishing touches for a line of attendees, sitting right across from EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network) Global Catholic Network whose booth has a dignified display of crosses and prayer cards and is open to all. Penthouse Media Group is just a few aisles away from Oxygen. Disney & ESPN, The Sportsman Channel, SiTV, Here! Networks, HSN, QVC, Fox Cable Networks, Hallmark, Discovery Channel, The Horse Racing Channel, The History Channel, The Fright Channel, Bloomberg Television, HBO, … I’m longing for my remote to help me move from booth to booth.

Changing channels, sprinkled amongst the 300+ exhibits are the technology, internet and mobile companies such as Motorola, Samsung, Sprint Nextel, Tivo, mobitv, Google, Cisco,... Internet and mobile have a small presence here and show the power of new distribution channels for content, and the market moving to triple and quad play offerings.

Not to be out done, TV shows its new technology too … Discovery Channel is showing a flyover of Machu Picchu in 3D HDTV on an enormous screen – looked like you were there – and I can say that because I was once, but that’s another story. Another booth had viewers mesmerized in front of the Panasonic 103” plasma tv. Most of the booths looked more like living rooms with comfy couches and coffee tables, so buyers could relax and get deals done.

Some of the characters step out of the tv to perform and later sign autographs and stand for pictures with attendees. The Fight Science dream team from National Geographic bashing stacks of cinder blocks with their foreheads drew hundreds of people - and shakes of the head from Silicon Valley-ites who earn their living by protecting theirs. Gospel Music Channel booth is playing soul-soaring music, and later American Idol Top 5 finalist George Huff will perform from his debut album. For the 15,000 attendees, there were opportunities to meet Dan Rather, Sponge Bob, the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, John Schneider (Dukes of Hazard, Smallville), and others …

Comcast has a large presence and was showcasing their content including Sprout, FEARnet, G4 (www.g4tv.com), Golf Channel, E!, TVOne, and ExerciseTV with Jake of Body by Jake signing his book "I've Seen a Lot of Famous People Naked, and They've Got Nothing on You!" (which you might not guess is a book of Jake's business secrets for entrepreneurs.)

And talk about the bandwidth of cable, I saw all of that in about 2 hours on the exhibit floor - who knows what I missed the other 10+ hours it was open - they kept the events and celebrities coming!

We’re already having fun working with Comcast! And if you're a current Comcast and Plaxo subscriber, you already know what we've got on the way. (link back to other blog post) If not, stay tuned for the results of the partnership!

The founders of fleck.com--and organizers of The Next Web conference--were visiting Silicon Valley from Amsterdam, Nederlands. They camped out at Plaxo for an afternoon and a fun time was had by all.

Pictured: Arjen Schat (fleck), Joseph Smarr (plaxo), Patrick de Laive (fleck), me/Rikk Carey (plaxo), and Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (fleck).

The white suits are the fleck.com trademark. Fleck.com enables people to annotate any web page and share it with others. So, when they unveiled their first product, they attended a TechCrunch party hosted by Michael Arrington, and wore the white suits so that everyone at the party could annotate them!

The reaction in the blogosphere and media to our just-announced partnership with Comcast has been quite positive, especially in terms of what it means for the industry. The folks over at Read/WriteWeb note that “web companies that provide best of breed applications can have a viable business model,” and that “The benefit of using the likes of Zimbra or Plaxo is that they are nimble and so they can quickly provide value added tools for bigcos like Comcast…”

CNET says that the Comcast deal could be significant for the companies involved, and TechNewsWorld think that “Services such as SmartZone promise simplicity and convenience.”

Though I’m biased, I agree this announcement means big things for the companies involved and big things for users. Unifying multiple forms of communication with a single, smart address book is an obviously good idea -- and one that I expect other forward-leaning companies will embrace.

John McCrea

Today is a big day for us at Plaxo, as our partnership with Comcast was just announced. Plaxo will be part of Comcast’s Smartzone™, which aims to provide Comcast Triple Play customers with one central location to send and receive email and instant messages, check voicemail online, etc.

(The beta/soft launch for our work together started a few weeks back. If you’re currently a Comcast Broadband Customer and a Plaxo Member, you can sign up now by clicking here. )

We’re obviously thrilled to be working with Comcast, which is the nation’s leading MSO, with over 24.2 million cable customers, 12.1 million high-speed Internet customers, and 3.0 million voice customers. This should have significant implication's for Plaxo's growth curve.

We’re also thrilled, because our partnership is great example of the power of a smart, networked address book. Todd and Cam started Plaxo to help people access their contacts (as well as calendars, notes, tasks, etc.) from a wide variety of different sources and tools. (E.g. Outlook, Yahoo!, Google, AIM, mobile phones, etc.) Along the way, we’ve discovered that the networked address book is also an incredibly important piece of foundation on which to build innovative consumer services. By being part of the SmartZone unified communications center, for example, we can make it easier for people to communicate with friends, families, and customers, whether they are at home using the fantastic array of Comcast communications services (such as e-mail, digital voice, video IM,etc.), or at work using Outlook, on the road, at an internet café, on their mobile, etc. What Comcast is doing in integrating a smart address book into all their services will make their services more interesting and valuable to users, and will serve as a model for many other service providers in making so called “triple-play” services truly integrated.

At its heart, the address book is really the list of the people that you know, care about, and interact with. The calendar is the representation of what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and what you plan to do. Done right, the smart, networked address book and calendar should be able to form the foundation for vastly improved communications, content, and community functions.

At Plaxo, we’ve spent a lot of time doing the un-sexy work necessary to make address books and calendars worthy of being that foundation (e.g. putting them in the network, making them sync everywhere, making them fuller and more accurate, building out APIs, working on security, performance, and availability, etc.) Now, after several years, it is really gratifying to see forward-thinking companies like Comcast start to build exciting solutions leveraging the smart, networked address book.

We’ve announced a few similar partnerships in the past, including AOL and Openwave, and we are starting to work with a wide variety of other service providers, social networks, device manufacturer, etc. I think the industry is waking up to the power of smart, networked address books. The next few years should be fun!

Ben Golub
CEO

P.S. Here's thoughtful commentary on the announcement by Om Malik.

If you've followed our blog, you know that at Plaxo we love to periodically do all-day Hackathons, which we call Haxo days. By now we've created a ton of cool little features and products, but so far we have not done a good job of getting them into the hands of our users. It's often a lot of work to take a side project and fully integrate it with our existing code and UI, but many of the things we've built could be perfectly useful on their own. We just haven't had the right home for them. Until now.

Starting today, we've got a new Plaxo Labs site, where we'll be putting a bunch of projects we cooked up in our spare time that we want to share. Some are rougher than others, but they're all far enough along that we'd love you to play with them and let us know what you think.

To kick things off, we've released the following five projects to Plaxo Labs:

• A new-and-improved Plaxo WAP site for mobile phones (like our first WAP version, this project started as a passionate side project by one of our engineers and quickly turned into a full-featured product)


• A plaxo search page for quick lookup of all your Plaxo data, which can also be added as a search plugin in IE7 and Firefox


• Plaxanoid: the classic game with a Plaxo twist (this was one of our engineer's way of teaching himself JavaScript, and it definitely brought company productivity to a halt for at least a day as we all started playing it)


• A map view of your entire address book--it can take a while to load, but it's a really interesting new way to see all the people you know


• A downloadable troubleshooter for Outlook that can automatically diagnose many of the common connectivity problems our customer support team normally deals with

This is just the start--now that all our Haxo projects have an easy place to get released, expect to see a bunch more things on labs in the near future. For each project, we've set up a discussion group and email address for feedback--please let us know what you think and what you'd like to see!

--Joseph Smarr, Architect and Haxo enthusiast