Cellity Launches Open Beta

by Michelle Lentz

Cellity today announced the beta release of Addressbook 2.0 within the cellity Communicator Suite, focusing on contact management across applications. Whether contact data comes from a cellphone address book, Outlook, Facebook, or Twitter, contact details are aggregated and kept up-to-date using a central interface. Over a year of work went into creating the new interface and features.

It gets hard to keep track of all your contacts. For instance, the people I connect with on Facebook (high school and college reconnections, family, dance students, wine bloggers) are completely different from those I connect with on LinkedIn (business associates, potential clients).  Scientific research has found that social network users are registered at an average of two to three communities. Cellity integrates all of the contact information into one location.

According to Nils Weitemeyer, CEO and co-founder of cellity AG, “We are very pleased to make the new cellity Communicator and its innovative address book available to a wider audience in the open beta test version. Alongside Outlook, cellphone usage, Twitter and emails, almost half of all Internet users are part of social networks mostly to carry on personal communication and maintain their personal contacts. Our new Addressbook 2.0 provides a crucial tool giving users access to all their current contact data so they can communicate using a single application.”

The new communication tool allows direct access to all cellity Communicator functions, including sending emails to and from cellphones, text messaging, phone conferencing, convenient telephony, as well as Twitter and Facebook update feeds. I had a bit of a trouble getting cellity to communicate with my iPhone here in the US, but I suspect it might have been me. Regardless, the Web interface was easy to set up and use.

Using cellity’s new Address 2.0, I was able to easily import all my contacts from Gmail, Mac.com, and Twitter. Last I checked, I had around 325 contacts imported. Remember though, it only imports the information available. Importing a Twitter contact gets you their name, avatar, Twitter ID, and their URL, for instance – all the stuff in a Twitter bio. It also let me simultaneously update my Facebook and Twitter statuses, which was nice. Finally, I had no trouble setting up one of my external IMAP email accounts, from which I could send emails through cellity – handy when you’re on the go and your account doesn’t have webmail access.

A few days ago I might have offered you beta codes. Instead, the beta has been opened to everyone as of this morning. Let us know what you think in the comments.

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