We are very excited to announce that Silentale for iPhone is now available for download in the App Store!

Why is this so cool? Well, if you’re already using Silentale, you know how powerful it is to be able to keep track of your contacts and conversations from wherever you are.

But most of all, Silentale for iPhone is the first application that automatically wraps all your contacts into one single interface. You get a 360° view of all your contacts, including the messages and attachments you’ve exchanged with them, consolidated across Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, multiple emails plus more, directly from your iPhone.

And it’s completely free.

So even if you’re out & about, the iPhone app will let you easily see what you’ve talked about with your network, and let you quickly choose how to contact them.

How it works

Get it now!

See? Silentale for iPhone is the smart way to carry everyone you communicate with, and all the conversations you’ve had, with you wherever you go. So go ahead and get it now from the App Store!

And once you’ve tried it out,  we’d love to hear how Silentale for iPhone helps you build stronger relationships with your network. Comment below or email us.

As of today, Silentale comes in two flavors, free and premium.

• Our “Starter” plan gives you the essentials of Silentale for free: unlimited backup of up to five accounts, including the import of 6 months of message history;

• Our “Pro”  and “Pro Plus” plans at $49 and $99/year allow you to track up to 10 or 20 accounts and import either 2 years worth or your complete message history.

All the plans & pricing details can be found on our website.

Introducing paid offers was a natural step forward for Silentale. From the beginning, we chose to be advertising-free, because the privacy and security of your data is paramount. And charging customers in a market where almost everything is for free can be pretty challenging… but recent events have reinforced how important it is for us to feel safe and comfortable about where our data is stored and how much control we have over it.

With Silentale, the answer is simple. Your archive is securely stored on Amazon Web Services, the leading provider of Cloud storage. Your data is never shared or made public. And we don’t ask you to connect with others. It’s your own personal backup of your contacts & conversations.

Our paid plans are comparable to other backup services in the market, even though we believe being able to access and search your archive whenever you want is a really valuable extra feature. But storing all those contacts & messages does have a price. We’ve tried to make our offer as attractive as possible by including a free option, and only charging customers who are storing the most data.

So signup now and try us out for free!

We’re proud to announce we’ve been selected as one of this year’s Red Herring 100 Europe Winners. You can read the official press release here .

Red Herring’s editorial staff screened hundreds of companies based on a set of criteria, such as financial performance, technological innovation, management quality, strategy, and market penetration.

Choosing the companies with the strongest potential was by no means a small feat, said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of candidates from across Europe to the Top 100 Winners. We believe Silentale embodies the vision, drive and innovation that define a successful entrepreneurial venture. Silentale should be proud of its accomplishment, as the competition was very strong.

Top 100 companies from Europe, North America, and Asia are now enlisted for the Red Herring Global competition whose winners will present in San Diego on December 14-16.

We’re happy to let you know that while we work on the finishing touches to launch our paid plans, there will be 2 more weeks to lock in a free account… until June 14th.

This means that your existing free account and everything you’ve imported and archived will remain in place, regardless of the number of services you’ve connected. We will not delete anything from your account.

We think our initial customers deserve to be grandfathered! Your account will continue to be free for as long as you’re with us. If you then decide to upgrade to one of our premium plans for additional features or to continue to add more services, it’s completely up to you.

Starting June 14, all new users can choose from the following plans:

• the Free Starter plan to connect 5 or less services & import 6 months of messages
• the $49/year Pro plan to track up to 10 services & import 2 years of messages
• the $99/year Pro Plus plan for up to 20 services & unlimited message import.

Launching our paid plans will allow us to cover the costs of storing all those messages & contacts, and we’re looking forward to becoming a “real” business.

So there’s still 2 weeks left to signup for Silentale and get your free account. If you have any friends who haven’t tried us out yet, tell them to sign up before June 14th while they can add & track as many services as they want for free.

Thanks to all our existing customers for their feedback & support!

From today, you can now securely connect your Gmail or Google Apps Mail accounts to Silentale using OAuth.

Until recently, whenever you wanted to access your Gmail or Google Apps Mail from a different device, website or application, you had to enter your username & password. This was a pain from a practical point of view, since you had to update everything every time you changed your login details. Plus a lot of people were uncomfortable sharing this private information.

OAuth allows you to authenticate external services without disclosing your password. It’s commonly used by Facebook and Twitter third-party apps. Silentale already lets you connect your Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Highrise and Google Contacts via OAuth.

On the other hand, email services haven’t been really OAuth friendly… until recently. Which is ironic because your email account is probably the most important and the most sensitive of your communication services, and at the same time, the one you need to remotely access the most.

In fact, the absence of OAuth signin was preventing some of you from adding a Gmail or Google Apps Mail connector to your Silentale account, as explained by Nader:

“I didn’t like the fact that I had to give my username and password for gmail and live mail access. I did not do so, even though the wealth of my interactions are through email, and I will lose most of the benefits of silentale without them.”

Also, without OAuth, Google sometimes displays warnings about potential malicious access when our servers are importing your messages and contacts, which was a terrible user experience.

Asking for your credentials to connect your email to Silentale was as painful for us as for you, and it was really a relief when Google announced their OAuth support for emails.

So go right ahead and safely connect your Gmail or Google Apps Mail account:

Or update your existing connectors without disclosing your password!

And for all you developers out there, our team has released an open source Ruby gem so anyone can implement Gmail IMAP and STMP via OAuth for their services. More on our dev team’s blog.

Last but not least, Yahoo! also announced their new OAuth API for Yahoo Mail, so stay tuned for further announcements…

We’re very excited to announce our public beta launch! As of today, anyone can signup for free at Silentale, and accounts created by the end of May can add an unlimited number of services to track (see more below).

Silentale is one convenient place to backup all of your communication channels, letting you search across your consolidated contacts & messages to easily find what you need. It’s like Dropbox for communications… the first totally accessible archive for your digital conversations.

What have we been up to?

Since we launched our private beta last September, we’ve been focused on getting the basics right. Mostly, we’ve been talking/listening to our users…figuring out what they like (and don’t like!), and what they really want us to add, to make managing their contacts & communications easier. A BIG thank you to everyone who has provided feedback, whether via our satisfaction or other surveys, in one-to-one conversations, by sending a ticket on the site, or by email, twitter, and facebook – we really, really appreciate it.

We’ve also focused on a LOT on the backend. In fact, that’s probably what we’ve spent the most time doing on the development front. It’s tricky, because most of that work isn’t anything that you can point to and say “ta da… there it is!”, or that you would necessarily notice.

But for a service that consolidates and backups all your contacts & messages, that you can also access to search and manage your personal data, this is super important, and much harder than just displaying your messages to you in real-time. We have to be able to import your history as quickly & seamlessly as possible, and index it in a structured way so that you can easily find what you need.

Plus be able to scale so we can add lots of new users, and their millions of messages and contacts. We’re already processed 50m messages and 10m contacts… to give you an idea: that’s the equivalent of 1/10 of the US Library of Congress!

Here’s a list of all the new stuff we’ve rolled out since our private beta launch… you can read more about each on the links:

• Firefox Add-on v1.0: to let you quickly see contact details and the latest messages you’ve exchanged with someone across all the channels you’re tracking when you’re looking at an email from them, or when you’re browsing their profile on social networks.
• LinkedIn Contacts for a 360º view of your business connections
• Search Plugin to let you search your contacts & messages right from your browser search bar
• more powerful Search, thanks to a detailed structured database with loads of metadata behind-the-scenes.
• complete overhaul of Contacts (previously known as People Book) organized by source, and the ability to send them a message or see all the messages you’ve exchanged with them in just 1 click.
• Facebook Messages
• Highrise Contacts
• the ability to choose the Profile Picture for your contacts, which was also release as the open source Faces that other developers can use to grab avatars from multiple sources.
• open Data API to allow developers to build new applications and services leveraging Silentale’s infrastructure.

Next up

And there’s still a lot more to come, some of it coming very soon:

• messages by category, including newsletter/spam separation
• Firefox Add-on v2.0
• iPhone app (we were a finalist for the 2010 App Star Awards)
• Android app (being built by a 3rd party developer)
• Outlook plugin
• reply to messages
• contact editing
• CRM-like features, including notes, tags, metrics and more
• contact discovery
• even more open APIs for developers
• loads more services you can connect, including chat and SMS

Lock in your free account by the end of May!

We’re planning to introduce our paid plans on June 1, although there will still be a free version of Silentale for users who want to connect 5 or less services. So signup today to take advantage of our special promotion: all accounts created by the end of May will be locked in as free, and can connect as many services and import as much message history as they want before then!

So if you haven’t already, go signup now at silentale.com for your own personal CRM to keep track of & backup your contacts & conversations.

Note: Accounts created before May 31 will be grandfathered as free accounts, no matter how many services are connected or message history imported. After our paid plans are launched, these accounts will remain free, unless a customer wants to connect over 5 services.