(I just got back from Spain and I have a cold. I had not gotten around to publishing this post yet.)

I got an invitation by Daniel Spronk to have lunch at the Eight Media office in Arnhem Friday two weeks ago. I was curious to their setup and having just graduated I had some free time on my hands. Cristiano had noticed their product Soocial during FOWA but I hadn’t realized that they were based in the Netherlands.

They are situated in a nice building a small walk from Arnhem centre. Their office looks nice, cosy and heavy on the Macs (see the pictures).

Total Experience

After a tour of the office I talked mostly with Daniel, Stefan and Salmon. We discussed what we we talked a bit about what they do, why they do it and where they’re going. Eight Media started out with Daniel and Stefan in 2001 as a small web agency and has since grown to the twelve people it houses right now.

They are very big fans of Python and Django because it is a nice language (Doh!) and Django enables them to setup site prototypes really really easily. I saw a demo of a site they were making with a Scriptaculous powered live search functionality which was very rich indeed.

Soocial

Recently they started working on a startup of their own called Soocial.

Soocial creates a central repository of your contacts which you can easily sync from your mobile with SyncML but also to any other location where you might want to have access to the people from your address book. Easy and seamless synchronization is key for Soocial’s success and they are taking the mobile phone as the primary access point to solve. This means they are busy building a SyncML conduit and easy ways of distributing and installing that on a variety of mobile phones.

They also provide a web interface where you can easily view and manage your contacts. Contacts are presented with hCard markup so you can easily access your data. I believe the plan is to expose an API so anybody who wants to write a plugin for other remote stores can do so. So if you want to send your data to Outlook, Highrise or GMail it should eventually be possible.

Sociality

Once you have a listing of somebody’s contacts, you pretty much also have a very accurate map of their social circle. Address books used to be nexus of your social interaction in the pre-web era. A little book scribbled full with names, addresses, phone numbers, notes, post-its and whatnot. A very rich carrier of social information which has seen very poor digital equivalents.

In the online world social interaction has completely diverged into closed applications each with its own silo of information. E-mail started it off, followed by instant messaging —which already has never been adequately supported in addressbooks—, mobile phones with calling and texting and it has gotten completely out of hand with the current diarrhea of social networking across all dimensions.

Convergence is unlikely to come up any time soon and without that the best we can really hope for is easy and painless interoperability. Soocial is building that, but it is undoubtedly going to prove really really difficult.

Soocial’s first take on the sociality of address books is to make updates propagate through your trusted social circle. So if you enter a new cell number, all your friends will automatically have it updated on their cell phones. They are aware that the data they store has much more applications and they will work further on that after the base functionality is in place.

I think one nice thing would be for me to enter my details using an OpenID with an hCard available at the same URL or at my provider. This way I could be always in control of my own information and still tie it into their network.

Their FOWA presentation got them a lot of buzz and they are now busy getting an alpha release out to their initial group of testers. The testing group is already filled up but you can still register. I did, but SyncML is not likely to work on my Nokia 3310.

The vibe I got was that these are nice guys who definitely know what they’re doing. They have a small, fun results oriented operation and they are scaling operations and attracting new people and having fun while doing so.

It’s interesting to see what will happen and it is fun to see that the Netherlands does have its own share of startups even in remote locations such as Arnhem.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 7th, 2007 at 0:56 and is filed under Dutch, agency, mobile, startup.