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.

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.

We are pleased to announce that Silentale has been selected to present in front of a great panel of judges at LeWeb08. The conference will be taking place in Paris on December 9 and 10. 30 contestants will be presenting and the top 3 startups will then have the chance to present on the main stage. This will be a great opportunity for the winners to get some real time feedback from 1,500 people, including potential users, partners and investors.

If you’re planning on attending the event, then mark your calendar to come and listen in, as it will be Silentale’s first public presentation.

If you’re unable to attend, please feel free to contact me during or after the conference. And as usual, use twitter, SMS (+33672014787), Skype or email as me as a last resort.

Lastly, if you want to be one of the first to use Silentale, visit www.silentale.com to get an invitation, or reach out to us during the conference; Nicolas Fouché and myself will be there.

•••

The 30 companies that have been selected for the 2008 Start-up Competition are:

1. 2Win-Solutions – FRANCE
2. 3scale networks S. L. – SPAIN
3. Apture – USA
4. Box.net, Inc. – USA
5. Brozengo SA – FRANCE
6. Charge Ventures – Malta
7. Cmune – CHINA
8. ConTrust – ISRAEL
9. DoctorSIM – SPAIN
10. Edicy – ESTONIA
11. Haploid – FRANCE
12. IZI-collecte – FRANCE
13. Kaltura – USA
14. MyID.is Certified – FRANCE
15. Nimbuzz – NETHERLANDS
16. Popego Inc. – USA
17. Producteev Inc. – USA
18. Publing – FRANCE
19. Radionomy – BELGIUM
20. Samedi GmbH – GERMANY
21. ShoutEm Ltd. – CROATIA
22. Silentale – FRANCE
23. SquareClock – FRANCE
24. Tellmewhere – FRANCE
25. Trendiction – LUXEMBURG
26. Viewdle, Inc – UKRAIN
27. Webnode.com – CZECH REPUBLIC
28. Zavedenia.com – BULGARIA
29. Zipipop Ltd (Zipiko) – FINLAND
30. Zoover Holiday Reviews – NETHERLANDS

The judges will be:

• Ola Ahlvahrsson – Result
• Roberto Bonanzinga – Balderton Capital
• Mike Butcher – TechCrunchUK
• Laurent Chiozotto – Sun Microsystems
• Julien Codorniou – Microsoft
• Don Dodge – Microsoft
• David Hornik –August Capital
• Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet – Price Minister
• Simon Levene – Accel Partners
• Om Malik – GigaOM
• Dave McClure – 500Hats
• Freddy Mini – Netvibes
• Marc Samwer – European Founders Fund
• Axel Schmiegelow – Sevenload
• Gary Shainberg – British Telecom
• Megan Smith – Google
• Pascal Thomas – Orange
• Martin Varsavsky – FON