Gwabbit made a splash earlier this year at DEMO 2009 when it showed off software that can automate the process of taking contacts from emails and putting them into Microsoft Outlook’s address book. Now it is doing the same thing for BlackBerry smart phones.

When an email comes into the BlackBerry, Gwabbit will automatically search for contact information. It will then check to see if the contact is already in the BlackBerry’s address book. If it is, it will do nothing. If the contact isn’t there, the software asks the user if they want the contact information entered. If the user says yes, then Gwabbit will automatically add the contact information. In that sense, it’s a big time saver.

Todd Miller, chief executive of Carmel Valley, Calif.-based Technicopia, which built the Gwabbit product, said that the company is filling out its contact cloud offerings with the expansion into BlackBerrys, allowing users to have access to their most current contacts anywhere they roam.

The BlackBerry version will be available for sale on Gwabbit’s web page on May 25. It will cost $9.95 a year. That’s different from the Outlook version, which costs a one-time fee of $19.95. That’s because the BlackBerry doesn’t have the processing power to do the constant tasks of monitoring emails and entering new contacts. Technicopia does that processing on its servers, which leads to higher server costs. That’s why the pricing will wind up being more expensive over time for the BlackBerry version.

Miller said that the February launch of the Outlook version succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He said that 43 percent of customers purchased it without even doing a trial. For those who try out software, only about 2 percent usually wind up buying it. But Miller said more than 20 percent of customers are buying it.

It’s the brainchild of Miller and the name is a combination of the words grab it and rabbit/wabbit (hence, the silly rabbit mascot). Miller had the idea as far back as 2001. He was sick and tired of pasting contacts, field by field, into Outlook. But he was tied up with another startup, WebFeat, which created a federated search engine for research and business purposes.

In 2008, he sold that business to ProQuest, and was stunned to discover that Microsoft still hadn’t automated its tedious contact system. When he looked around, he found solutions like Address Grabber.
The Xobni email manager has a similar solution that grabs phone numbers, but for some reason it doesn’t grab the rest of the contact data and store it. Miller funded the project with his own money. He anticipates the company will be profitable in two months.

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Read the original article at Venture Beat:
Gwabbit to automate contact entry for BlackBerrys