
With the massive amount of information to sort through, finding everything that you need becomes a difficult and tedious task, especially when that information is dispersed across several different places. Alongside the data mining project that we are currently working on, the problem of contact management has always intrigued us. With some of our customers having well over 25,000 contacts being managed by Constant Contact, and most likely even more information about these contacts and others spread out amongst several other mediums, there had to be a better way to do things, to easily extract valuable information out of that.
It is unfortunate, but probably not very controversial, to say that mobile web sites tend to be second-rate afterthoughts compared to “real” desktop-browser-optimized sites. A lot of popular web sites either provide no mobile-optimized version at all, provide an overly-specific one built only for the iPhone, or provide a super-generic, watered-down WAP version that admittedly presents the content, but usually so that it looks like an unstyled bulleted list. What’s worse, none of these mobile strategies really scale well to handle new devices - say, a new class of device with a screen halfway between that of a smartphone and a desktop. The iPhone-specific version usually doesn’t display properly, the WAP version is way too basic, and the full desktop site often requires Flash, Silverlight, Java, or other heavyweight plugins that aren’t always available.
It’s kind of a mess.

(Since its launch a few weeks back, the iPad has been a hot topic at Constant Contact both internally and in questions and comments from customers. As part of its technology investigation charter, Labs has been coming to grips with what the iPad is all about. This is the first of two contrasting opinion pieces that Labs members have put together. As always, the opinions expressed herein are those of the individual author, not necessarily those of the company.)

Let’s continue the theme of Cool Stuff Week-related posts. Brendan’s told us about OpenSocial, Huan has compared Rails and Django, and I’m happy to talk now about one of my CSW projects. It’s a prototype iPhone app I’m calling Postcard, and I think it’s a big step towards addressing one of our customers’ most pressing problems.
It’s so helpful. Thanks a lot.