Highrise is the popular online CRM for small businesses made by 37Signals that helps SMEs organize the avalanche of information related to their customers and partners. It offers a straight-forward contact manager, the ability to create notes, provides tools for reminders, collaboration and follow-up. We’re very fond of everything 37signals and are avid Highrise users because of its emphasis on simplicity and ease-of-use.

More and more, business conversations are taking place across a huge variety of communication platforms, including professional but also personal channels. The number of small businesses actively using social media to attract new customers has doubled from 12 to 24% in the last year (Small Business Success Index, Feb 16, 2010). Today, it’s simply impossible to limit interactions to email only! Companies are increasingly using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other networks to promote their brand and products, and to manage relationships with existing customers.

So, we’re especially excited to announce that we’re adding Highrise Contacts to Silentale. It demonstrates our commitment to integrate with business solutions, and will provide professionals and small businesses with a unique tool to track their communications and relationships with prospects, customers and partners.

Thanks to all our beta users who have taken the time to give us great quality feedback via our surveys, Tweets, support tickets etc. We really appreciate all your suggestions about how to improve Silentale to make it even more useful, and we’re busy working on rolling out the most requested features as fast as we can.

One of your top requests was to automatically present your contacts by categories in the People Book, so that you can view your contacts grouped by how you’re connected to them, as well as see how to reach them. So we’ve reorganized the People Book into 3 columns:

The left column organizes your contacts by the different sources you’ve connected.

“My Contacts” is a consolidated view of your:

• LinkedIn Connections = first-degree connections from your Linkedin account(s)
• Facebook Friends = friends from your Facebook account(s)
• Twitter Contacts = followers, followees and recipients (of @ direct messages and replies) of your twitter account(s)
• Google Contacts = contacts from your Google Contact address book(s)
• Email Recipients  = people to whom you sent a message/reply at least once by email

“Uncategorized” are the people who have sent you a message, but don’t fit in any of the other “My Contacts” categories, mostly “the noise” made up of newsletters, spam, automated or service emails, etc. We split your Email contacts into these 2 categories so you can better find who you’ve actually communicated with.

The middle column lists the contacts in that category, and displays a preview including their name, picture (when available), and small icons that now indicate which contact details have been captured, for instance, their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter profiles as well as email addresses.

And finally, the right colum provides details for a highlighted individual contact, including a digest of their different profiles. You can click on any of the hyperlinked contact details to go directly to their profile page or compose a message. You can also click to see all the archived messages you’ve exchanged with them.

We hope those changes will streamline your use of the People Book. This is just the first step in reorganizing the functionality of the site, including adding filters for messages, so stay tuned for more improvements coming soon!

To celebrate 4 months since launching our private beta and the beginning of an exciting new year, we’re giving every Silentale user 5 invites to share with their friends. Consider it a big “thank you” for trying out Silentale, and giving us an incredible amount of useful feedback and ideas on how we can improve.

To invite a friend, simply go to http://my.silentale.com/invites or click on the “Invite a friend” link in the upper right corner of your Silentale account.

Your account will keep track of who you’ve sent invitations to, and how many invites you have left that you can send. So go ahead and invite your friends, and remember that the quickest way to get more invites is to use the ones you’ve got. If you’re the lucky recipient of an invitation, you’ll receive an email with a link to claim it.

So thanks again for everything, and we hope Silentale will continue to help you, and your friends, to easily and quickly find what you need from all your messages and contacts! We wish you nothing but success for 2010.

On the eve of LeWeb09, we wanted to give you an update about everything that’s happened in the last year since we won the People’s Choice award at LeWeb08, and what we’ve learned while doing it. It was a great conference, and where Silentale was unveiled for the first time, which really helped us to kick off our launch.

In the last year we’ve accomplished a lot, and learned even more:

• a great team can do great things (even if small): we added some world-class folks to the team, both experienced managers with a track record of rolling out new products at brands like Netscape, ComScore, AOL, Orange, BSkyB and Yahoo!, and even more importantly some great young development talent. We’d love to have even more folks on the team, but if you have to have just a few, they gotta be great.
• it’s lonely being the only one at the dance: when you’re launching a new service that can’t be compared to anything, it really helps to have other entrants in the same or similar space for people to reference, or growth in the general space you’re operating in.  The launch of Threadsy, MessageBunker, the impending arrival of Raindrop, and indirectly even GoogleWave demonstrates that there are others looking at a similar market. Plus the obscene growth and fragmentation of real-time communications helps demonstrate the need for a service that consolidates and archives all your conversations and contacts.  And it doesn’t hurt that we’re in the Cloud either…allowing users to access that information where they need to.
• meeting and talking to people gives great ideas: we attended as many events as we could on our travel budget, and met /engaged with as many people as we could (keeping dry mouth at bay with copious amounts of lubrication)…everyone from respected investors to journalists/bloggers, other startups, suppliers, potential partners etc. We can’t tell you how invaluable it is to not live in a silo, but to get feedback, share best practices and brainstorm ideas with as many folks as possible.  Trends start to emerge that you might otherwise have never thought of on your own…no matter how great a team you have.  Great events we participated in from 2009 include: Plugg, The Next Web, Web 2.0 Berlin & SF, various TechCrunch meetups, OpenCoffee Club, Nordic Venture Forum, Ignite Paris and Geeks on a Plane.
• users really are king: in the same vein, we’ve tried to listen to our users as much as possible, by conducting market research, conducting polls, and reviewing feedback from the site as well as tweets, blogpost comments etc., and use their comments to prioritize our development and improve the service.
• there is nothing better than launching: we launched our Private Beta on 8 September, and we can’t emphasize enough how much it helps to just get your product out there and start getting all that great feedback from your real (and royal) users, so you can iterate and improve your product to truly meet their needs.
• social media saves the day: being lean means $0 marketing budget, in whatever currency you care to count, but the community on the web means you can get the word out without having to spend. If you have a decent product, engage with the community and respond to feedback, you can grow.
• lean is HARD, but sharpens your focus:  you never have as many resources as you want; whether you work for a 5K employee company or with a handful of people, so prioritization of product development and everything else is key. Re: fundraising, we have learned that you need to have a) a sufficiently decent-sized user base (still wish someone could tell us what the magic number is), plus growth of that base going in the right direction, and b) ability to demonstrate that your business model will work, before you get any serious funding. Sort of a Catch-22, since you need the funding before you start to make money…but we get it. Heard loud & clear. Did we mention that we love our angels?
• scaling on a large scale is REALLY hard: our dev team worked their butts off building a process that can adequately scale to both process and store tens of millions of messages and contacts. We now have more sympathy for sites that sometimes have FailWhales during growth.
• tools of the trade make it possible: we’re operating at a great moment, where there are so many inexpensive tools and open platforms available, without which it would be impossible for us to function. You name it: customer support (Zendesk), surveys (PollDaddy & SurveyMonkey), email marketing tools (CampaignMonitor), databases (MongoDB, MySQL), cloud infrastructure (Amazon Web Services), collaboration (Yammer, Highrise and Box.net), marketing (HubSpot Marketing Tools), analytics (Google, bit.ly)…the list goes on and on, and we are grateful.
• going global is not a choice, it’s mandatory: altho our HQ is in Paris, our team of 8 represents 5 different nationalities (some with 2 or 3 each!), and we believe that to be truly successful, we have to be global. Our current beta users come from 57 different countries, and we have deliberately launched in English only initially to cater to the broadest possible audience. This may seem slightly controversial, and there can certainly be successful companies that cater for just one particular market, but if your ultimate goal is to compete on a global level, you have to prepare for that from Day 1.
• we get high off of buzz: we try not to obsess about it too much, and look at all feedback as good feedback whether positive or negative, but we do really get a buzz from positive buzz. As a startup, you hit so many walls, its important to get your high where you can! Anything from being called “Europe’s Hottest Startup?” in TechDigest (even with the “?”!) to a user tweeting “Everyone check out Silentale!!! F***ing great!” (thanks @harmen_h) really keeps us going.

So thanks again to LeWeb for providing the startup competition as a launchpad and showcase for startups in Europe.  We hope you all have a super and productive conference this year, whether you are attending in person, or watching from “home”. We’ll be at the conference and the events handing out beta invitations, so come say hello and grab one! We are also celebrating our 1 year anniversary by giving away 365 invites using the code HAPPYBDAY…just click here while supplies last.

Hey everyone – it’s been a hectic week since TechCrunch’s article about us last week…we were completely overwhelmed by the positive comments and tweets!  But we’re also very excited cuz it means that hopefully we’re on the right track, and that there’s a real need for the service out there.  There was also some followup coverage on FastCompany and GigaOm, which you can see from our Press page.

So now we are racing around like lunatics to send out invitations as fast as we can!  We’re doing this in batches to make sure we can ingest all those bytes from your thousands of messages… so please bear with us!  Getting the balance right between speed and scale is a bit tricky, but we are hoping to get through our entire waitlist in the next few weeks.

So watch your inbox for your personal invitation, and we look forward to welcoming you to Silentale!

Flickr image by @lorda

“My name is Lt. @lfp and I need me five techies. Five solid bug-busters. We’re gonna be dropped into the code, and once we’re in enemy territory, as a bushwackin’ guerrilla army, we’re gonna be doing one thing and one thing only… killing bugs. Each and every man under my command owes me 100 pesky bugs fixed and I want my fixes!”

Yep, our tiny office could have been the scene of a Tarantino movie the last two weeks… six guys camping out in cramped conditions… stuck for hours… tension was at a maximum. The mission was critical… it was all about sweat, and guts… no one could breathe… surviving solely on Red Bull.

Heroic developers were hunting down those elusive bugs… hideously hiding in the deepest part of the code. We had to go beyond enemy lines, and we showed no mercy! We smashed every beta blocker we could find… and we’ve killed enough of them to forge ahead.

Just call us the Inglorious Beta’rds, we made it. Silentale is in Private Beta as of today!

Thanks to all those good fellas who have been patiently waiting for the war to be won… Email invitations will start rolling out this week, and we hope to catchup as quickly as we can.  And hey, if you haven’t joined the bandwagon yet, you can still do it.