myFUNAMBOL: your contacts on the iPhone

So I listened to the imaginary suggestion of Steve Jobs and I showed up Friday at 6 pm at the Apple store in Palo Alto. I saw the long line (about 150 people), but not as long as I would have expected. I did not see Steve Jobs (who appeared from the sky in the store, some say). However, I saw a guy tearing one iPhone apart, in front of a camera (just for fun, I guess). The wait was too long, so I went out and had few beers with friends (that is what you are supposed to do on a Friday night, not standing in line...) and I came back at 10 pm (ok, maybe the beers were not few :-) Five minutes wait, and I got my iPhone. Went home, tried to activate it, waited until the next morning and had it working (and no hangover).

Now, the iPhone is an amazing device, with one missing feature that makes it just a toy for me, not something I can use everyday. It is missing over the air sync. That is, you cannot sync your address book or calendar, unless you are at home, your PC is on and you are connecting the iPhone to it with a cable.

I need my address book on the iPhone. Having wifi and cellular connectivity and being forced to use a cable is insane. I could do cable sync in the nineties with my Palm.

So... we decided to launch myFUNAMBOL.

myFUNAMBOL is a demo installation of our Carrier Edition (without push, in most cases). You can get email on your device for free (that is, your RAZR, Nokia, but also Windows Mobile) and you can sync your address book and calendar from whatever phone you have. It includes Outlook and iPod sync, but you can use the community plugins to sync Thunderbird, Yahoo, Evolution and so on. More info about it is on our web site.

The coolest thing is that you can use it with the iPhone.

So, if you have an iPhone and an old phone, you can sync your old phone and access your contacts on the iPhone. Or you can use Outlook, Thunderbird, Evolution to keep your address book updated in real time. Even Yahoo address book is there. Steve Jobs would say "this is the best portal we ever did".

For now, the myFUNAMBOL portal is beta and we are open it slowly. We received hundreds of requests in the first few hours and we are processing them. It is an early beta, so... be patient with us. In any case, more to come. This is just the beginning...