Zentact Blog

When I first found Zentact, it took me no time at all to realize how I was going to use this tool. I’ve played fantasy sports for the better part of a dozen years and it is always a challenge to keep track of which players are on which fantasy team. For example, in my ten owner National League only league, each owner has a roster of 40 players. That is 400 players on teams to keep track of — on top of trying to know which free agents I can add to my team. Compounding this problem is the fact that I’m not in only one of these leagues. It becomes an exponential problem pretty quickly.

Zentact saves me many mental cycles and much cross referencing between multiple sites. I’ve added a contact in Zentact for each of the owners in my league. For each owner contact, I’ve tagged them with all the players on their fantasy team. Now when I read an article that talks about baseball players, Zentact tells me which person in my fantasy team owns the players in the article. I don’t need to pop open a new tab and search by player name at the league page to mine that information anymore. Zentact does the player-to-fantasy team matching grunt work for me!

Fantasy sports have an aspect of information secrecy to them. I haven’t found myself reaching out to the owners I compete with to tell them how great their players are… just in case I want to trade for that player later. I do reach out to my co-owner very regularly, so that we are on the same page about what players to try to acquire. Once baseball season is full swing, I anticipate reaching out regularly to opposing team owners too to shoot them information about my players — seeding ideas in case about how awesome my players are.. just in case I’d like to trade them later.

Thank you Zentact team for creating this tool and sharing it with the world! I hope by season’s end I can also be thanking you for your help in winning me another fantasy baseball championship.

- Timothy Dady Jr. h

This past week,  we quietly pushed several new features and our latest extension.  If you are on our private beta, we are sure you will like these.

New features include:

• More robust contact information including LinkedIn, Blogs, RSS, Flickr and Delicious
• Automagical population of data - we have added Twitter handles to 8% of the contacts (more coming soon)
• Access to real time data while emailing.

To get started using these, you need to do just two things:

1. Download the latest extension at: https://zentact.com/zentact.xpi
2. Add data to a few key contacts.   (We will start populating it for you in the future.)

And enjoy.

Happy Friday the 13th!

Last night, we posted a new release of the web site and our Add-on.     There are numerous new features to be discussed so I will start with one of my favorites - our new Twitter integration.

When looking at the contacts in our database, we discovered nearly 10% of the email addresses were linked to Twitter accounts.   With over 500K contacts, we figured we could make this data useful.

For our users with Gmail (hosted or not),  we automatically add twitter data on the fly for you.   Email your contacts, in Zentact or not, and if there is a match, we will show you their latest tweet.

In the screen shot below, the first contact’s name and tags are missing because this email was the first I had ever sent to him.  The other two, Jared and Eric, both have complete information since they are in my database.

This is the first of many features that will add real time, actionable data into your email account.    To start to use this feature, just update your Add-on at https://zentact.com/zentact.xpi

John pushed another update yesterday.  In case you haven’t upgraded, you should by downloading the extension from zentact.com.     Much of the effort in this version is groundwork for our next site update so stayed tuned.  New features include:

• Page Titles are now Email Subjects - When sending an email, the page title will now be your email subject
• Basic Frequency Controls - Some basic frequency controls have been added to reduce unnecessary alerts to reach out
• Improved Handling of Large Contact Lists - A bug has been fixed with processing large contact lists

We are still working on the StumbleUpon bug.

For those of you who are addicted to your crackberry or any other phone/email device, we have justed added the ability to use email to update your Zentact account. To do this, just email add@zentact.com with the person’s email address, name and tags. We ignore the body text so feel to write whatever you want there.

Here’s the syntax:

user@email.com Full Name #tag1 #tag2 #tag3

Here’s an example with George Bush

george@whitehouse.gov George Bush #President #tea-totalers #gitmo

You can also update contacts this way. Next week, you could update George with “#ex-president and #Dallas”

Make sure you email from the email account you use with Zentact.

Why would you want to do this? Simple, it allows you to add or update people right after you connect.

Keep it fresh and enjoy!

John just pushed a new version our extension for your networking pleasure. It includes:

• Alert Tracking - We’re now tracking alerts. This will allow us to custom tailor your alert frequency and make using Zentact even more valuable in future releases.
• UI improved on LinkedIn and Yahoo! Mail
• “Reach Out!” added to alert box - Reach out to anyone about anything at any time. Add contacts and edit contact tags in Reach Out! to improve your Zentact experience.
• Right Click Menus - Use a PC, just right click and select Zentact to “Reach Out”.
• Improved Gmail integration - Fixed email matching quirk and single quote bug

Known Bugs in Version 0.6.8:

• Zentact Does Not Alert when Personal Email Editor is selected. To fix: change your My Account settings to use the Zentact email editor.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Fred Wilson’s recent posts about correspondence and the letters between Adams and Jefferson is worth a read.   Fred makes a strong argument that the internet is returning us to the past in terms of literacy and intellectual discussions are becoming more mainstream.   http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/12/correspondence.html

Zentact can become a powerful tool in making your correspondence more literate and hopefully more meaningful.   By helping you build contextual knowledge around shared interests, you interactions can become more interesting with less filler and more meat!

Interested in knowing more about how common your tags are - take a look at our completely alpha tag feedback page:http://zentact.com/tag_feedback.

Make sure you take the results with a grain of salt. My 300 plus tags are mostly accurate but some are not because of my own unique browsing. For example, “Hearth Restaurant” (entered with “AND”) shows as “May Never Alert”. It alerted two weeks back on a New York Times article about barrel aged beer due to a mention of the bar manager.

Let us know what you think.

And if you are in New York, give Hearth a try. It is excellent!

With New Year’s Eve parties rapidly approaching on Wednesday night, some of us will be facing an evening of both great conversations and boring small talk. Lifehacker’s has a great post on 10 hacks, http://lifehacker.com/399895/top-10-conversation-hacks, to help you with any conversation. I plan on testing #8 myself:

8. Ask sensitive questions indirectly to skip awkwardness.

When the info you need from someone is somewhat sensitive, check out journalist advice site MBToolbox’s suggestions for asking delicate questions indirectly. Use the bluff (”the breakup must’ve been hard, huh?”) or blame others (”so has anyone asked about your prison time?”) or the indirect inquiry (”what year did you get divorced?”) to broach sensitive topics with tight-lipped folks with more ease and less awkward silence.

Zentact can also help with conversations by providing context around shared interests and even names.   In my case, it helps me remember what is interesting to my friends.    With this knowledge, it is much easier for me to start a conversation and participate in a meaningful way.   Whether a ’simple congratulations for the TechCrunch’ mention or a ‘did you see this article’, I have meaningful things to say.

On Saturday, the New York Times published the following headline:

You May Not Like It, but Learn to Network

The Career Couch column by Phyllis Korkki is a great read - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/jobs/21career.html

Lots of tips and suggestions of what you should be doing including:

• Reciprocity is intrinsic to the process - you have to give to get
• Mutual interests are a great way to stay in touch and build relationships
• Face to face counts

While Zentact can’t help you with face to face meetings, it can help you with the rest.