tristanthomas

You should be able to get your contacts into Evolution or any other software that supports CardDAV. We will try and get some instructions up this week - check back on http://useadd.com/guides/connect later

Thank you for the comments, really appreciated.

Doh.

Top nav fixed. Working on the logo and buttons. Thank you.

Sorry :)

Very much so troels, thank you. An unbiased, outside view of the design is critical. Working on it now.

Thank you Henry. Much appreciated - check back in a few hours and hopefully it will be sorted.

Hi lifeisstillgood,

We obviously haven't made it clear enough on our site.

1. I would need to know a bit more about your setup - but if you are on a Mac, we have integration with your email, the Skype app and syncing to iPhone/Android.

If you are on Windows, then it's a bit more complicated and depends on what you use.

Drop me an email at hi@useadd.com if you want with your setup and I'll see if it will work, now or in the future.

Regards

Useful comments and suggestions more than welcome - hi@useadd.com

Agreed completely with most of your points - as I've already mentioned this is just the start and some of the things in the pipeline will easily surpass Google's relatively stagnant option.

However, I don't think Google does respect your privacy [1] [2]. That is a massive issue and is becoming greater over time and is something Add was created to directly counter.

Hopefully we can prove you wrong and still be here in 5 years - I want to build a sustainable and growing business, not a flash in the pan startup looking for a quick sale.

1. http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/update-on-buzz.html 2. http://blog.eset.com/2011/07/07/google-prepares-to-share-you...

We do have a roadmap - not with public dates, but items for the near term future include automatic exporting of your contacts from your current solution and better web management tools. The beauty of being a paid for solution is we can work to implement feature requests made by our customers rather than worrying about selling ads or finding a business model.

Hi impostervt,

Yep, agree with you - we by no means are all the way there yet and there's still lots to do. Syncing is seamless, but at the moment you do need to export your current contacts and upload them to us. We are working on fixing that. Outlook is an issue because of its lack of support for CardDAV and is an issue I'm looking at as we would love to have better support or at least a free plugin.

This is very much just the start. Thank you for your comments though.

Hi Holger,

OK, so Add is a replacement for your contacts syncing and storage (of Gmail/iCloud etc.) for people who care about their privacy and believe that paying for a product means you are the customer, not the user or worse, the product being sold.

Does that make it clearer?

Founder here: started on Hacker News back in November (1) and now built. There's lots still to do though - all thoughts and comments welcome. You can email directly at hi@useadd.com as well.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4777826

Sorry Eugenio, I obviously didn't make myself very clear or I'm misunderstanding your need. They are automatically synchronised with your Android phone and available in Calendars, Apps and the Phone. I bet you wouldn't even notice the difference from using Google Contacts.

With regards to backups, already done! We have full versioning so that you can roll back to anytime you want and backups are done continuously.

Hi ruswick,

There are lots of options for contacts storage for free, but we are aiming to provide a service for people who care about their data and who has it. There are many other great features of our product, but none as good (we think) as our commitment to your ownership of your data.

Hi Kijin,

We haven't put enough details about encryption on the landing page (because we didn't want to overload the page) but we will do very soon.

With regards to exportability, if you check out the feature in the bottom right (Full Ownership) you can see details about how easy it is to take your data elsewhere.

Hope that helps and thank you for your comments, really appreciate it.

Hi Eugenio,

Yep - your contacts can be easily transferred from Google Contacts and then used on your Android phone and in Thunderbird just the same.

Hi spot,

I'm sorry you feel that way - can I point you towards my reply to anonymouz as an extension of what we mean by that. Also, please feel free to email me directly at hello@columns.co if you have further questions or concerns.

One thing we want to combat against as well as direct selling of data which as you note is normally illegal is the use of your data within the company for other purposes (Google comes up as an obvious choice in selling advertisements against the information in your personal email, contacts and documents).

Thanks slap_shot. I guess what we are trying to do is explain to people like us (geeks) what we really mean by being sustainable and trusted. It annoys me when companies don't explain WHY they are something they claim to be.

That's what we are hoping! Because we aren't trying to be a massive company that does everything but instead a small, sustainable business, even if we don't have MASS market appeal we will still have an appeal for people like us that will fund the business.

Hi casca,

I totally understand and have actually stopped signing up for startups without a clear business model (even YC ones). I hope that our model means that we will be and if for some reason we aren't, because we make your data fully portable and completely yours, it would be very easy for you to move. Please feel free to email me at hello@columns.co if you want to discuss this further.

Hi Andrew,

Apologies for the lack of details - this is just our landing page and of course will be built out further.

In answer to your questions: yep, it supports Thunderbird. Yep, it supports CardDAV. In terms of syncing with your Google Contacts, I'm not 100% sure what you mean but you can import all of your Google Contacts and keep them synced up through Columns (if that's not what you meant please let me know!)

Hope that helps and thank you for your time.

Hi sneak, A couple of reasons - by paying for the service you are a customer and your desires align with ours rather than us wanting to use your data to make money - we will never sell it. You fully own your data - no big companies with complicated privacy policies. And we are transparent about backups and security - http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-hona... - our versioned backups don't allow things like the above to happen and result in the complete loss of data.

Hope that helps, please let me know if you have any questions either on here or at hello@columns.co.

Founder here - very excited to show HN and look forward to all comments and thoughts.