After you get over the funny name Gwabbit looks like a really cool application idea for BlackBerry. It automatically detects contact information in the signatures of emails and lets you add or update contacts based on that information. They have a very popular Outlook plugin that does the same thing but this is a first for BlackBerry. It almost makes me wonder why RIM did not think of this first…
The main flaw with Gwabbit is that it is based on a subscription model which makes no sense for such an application. It costs $9.95/year from the App World (sorry cant link to App World) compared to the one time fee of their desktop applications. VentureBeat looked into this and found out that this is because the company does the processing on their servers since the BlackBerry cannot handle it which is why they charge a monthly fee. This kind of scares me since it sounds like all of my emails will be going through their servers to process out the contacts. 🙁
As I said it is a really cool idea but its execution is a bit problematic with a subscription fee and the security of your emails & contacts…
You can read more at www.gwabbit.com
snark Not Registered
Posted: May 5, 2009 at 9:16 AM EST
“the company does the processing on their servers since the BlackBerry cannot handle it”
They must be kidding. Or have absolutely 0 coding experience. Munging out a signature (even now that the net is filled with aolers who have no idea what sig dashes are) is about 10 lines of C, or one of perl, or at most a couple of dozen of java. If the BB can decode video it can certainly handle a little text parsing.
I wouldn’t trust this snake oil for a second.
Ronen Halevy ( View Profile) - Posts: 4128
Posted: May 5, 2009 at 9:18 AM EST from my BlackBerry 9000
@Snark
That is what I was thinking. Its a cool idea but I don’t understand why they need to offload it. Not only does it cost more but it is insecure…