Show HN: Address book storage you can trust.

sneak wrote: post #3

tristanthomas wrote: post #2

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

I get iCloud for free. Why would I pay you for this?

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.

Re: Show HN: Address book storage you can trust.

#6

Post by tristanthomas » Tue, Nov 13, 2012, 1:55 PM UTC

AndrewDucker wrote: post #4

Complete lack of details there. Does it support Thunderbird? Does it support CardDav? Will it sync with my existing Google contacts?

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.

Re: Show HN: Address book storage you can trust.

#7

Post by casca » Tue, Nov 13, 2012, 1:55 PM UTC

"Trust" is a big offer. There are 2 main trust issues when I give my contact information to another company: 1) Will they keep as private as I would? and 2) Will they still be around in 5 years?

Your model means that I can somewhat believe 1), but 2) means that I personally would not use such a service.

Re: Show HN: Address book storage you can trust.

#8

Post by c1sc0 » Tue, Nov 13, 2012, 1:56 PM UTC

I'm not sure there is demand for this given that most people value convenience over security

But these kinds of business models appeal to me personally though. Lately I've been wondering if "It's like X, minus the evil part" is a valid startup strategy. Reason is the whole Hacker News Cologne fiasco with Meetup.com.

Some examples:

Stripe is a less evil PayPal. (edit: I mixed up Parse & Stripe) App.net is a less evil Twitter. XYZ is a less evil Meetup

Re: Show HN: Address book storage you can trust.

#9

Post by diggan » Tue, Nov 13, 2012, 1:58 PM UTC

How could one possibly know what they would pay for the service if they only see one page with features and not even a demo? Listing benefits is also a good thing on a product page.

Re: Show HN: Address book storage you can trust.

#10

Post by tristanthomas » Tue, Nov 13, 2012, 2:02 PM UTC

casca wrote: post #7

"Trust" is a big offer. There are 2 main trust issues when I give my contact information to another company: 1) Will they keep as private as I would? and 2) Will they still be around in 5 years? Your model means that I can somewhat believe 1), but 2) means that I personally would not use such a service.

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.