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”).

EDIT: My story is now featured on the 37Signals Product Blog. Cool!

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 mobile phones, 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. 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 it’s 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. Thus far the app is just a beta version that I hacked up over the past week, so I’d really appreciate any feedback at feedback@whobook.mobi or in the comments here.