New: A Mobile Version of 37Signals’ Highrise CRM

WhoBook MOBI is a version of Highrise optimized for mobile phones. If you haven’t heard of Highrise, 37Signals’ dead simple CRM web app, you should check it out. Basically it’s an online contacts database, with support for notes about contacts (“Left him a voicemail Tuesday”), tasks (“Follow up with John”), and cases (for organizing multiple people on a project). There are tons of uses for Highrise – it’s used by many small business to keep track of customer relationships, and even by one local pastor to keep track of interactions with his congregation. I used Highrise extensively in my job search – as I interviewed at multiple companies, in multiple rounds, all those faces started to blend together. I had amassed a huge stack of business cards with short handwritten notes on the back. I needed a way to organize it all.

Enter Highrise. I spent two hours one day typing all those contacts into Highrise. Now I can search by name, by company, or even by industry (I’ve tagged all my contacts with the industry they work in). Highrise also keeps track of every email I’ve ever exchanged with that contact, as well as any notes that I’ve added to help me remember who they are (“John loves the Giants” or “Steve has red hair and looks like Ron Howard”). In fact, my story and use case has been featured on the 37Signals Product Blog.

I became so dependent on having my Highrise contacts that I soon realized the biggest shortcoming of the application: no mobile version. Luckily, Highrise has a robust API, so I was able to program exactly the mobile version that I needed to get my Highrise contacts onto my cell phone.

The result is WhoBook MOBI. It’s built specifically for Blackberry and older mobile phones with WAP-based browsers, and provides read-only access to your Highrise contacts. Simply search for their name, and you’ll get back their contact information (with one-click dialing on the phone numbers) as well as any notes you’ve written about them. In addition to the mobile web interface, WhoBook MOBI also has SMS support – send a text to 41411 in the form “WHOBOOK john” and you’ll receive a text back with John’s phone number(s).

WhoBook MOBI is free, unlike some other websites out there that do similar things. I’m also pretty sure that it’s the only way to access your Highrise contacts via SMS that exists. If you find it useful or have any feature requests, I’d really appreciate any feedback at feedback@whobook.mobi or in the comments here.

UPDATE 4/11/2010: Since I wrote this post, 37Signals has released an iPhone app for Highrise. The official app works great for those with iPhones, but if you’re in the 90% of mobile phone users who don’t own an iPhone, there is still no official Highrise mobile app for you. That’s where WhoBook MOBI comes in – it’s entirely text-based and optimized for the basic WAP browsing available on old school Blackberries and “regular” mobile phones. I’ve just done a scrub of the codebase and added a few new features, so check out WhoBook MOBI if you’re not a member of the iPhone crowd and want to access your Highrise contacts on the go.