Gist.

There are over 600,000,000 Microsoft Outlook installs in the world (according to our friends on the MS Outlook product team over in Redmond) making it one of the most widely used knowledge worker applications around.  With such a huge install base, there are many different product add-ins to improve the experience, enhance search, and integrate to various different applications and information services including the recent addition of the Outlook Social Connector directly by Microsoft.  Here’s an interview with Gist CEO T.A. McCann on Techflash about how it fits with what we are doing at Gist.

We think this innovation is fantastic and are focused on further enhancing the user experience inside Outlook by bringing the profiles we create and importance we determine into the application.  Oh, and we do a pretty nice job helping you find that link, attachment, or previous email conversation with a contact.

At Gist, our goal is to put the information about your most important contacts and companies into the places where you already spend your time.  Millions live in Outlook everyday and that is why we built the Gist Outlook Plugin to bring your email, calendar, and address book to life.

Below is a quick product tour of how Gist works inside Outlook.  Download it (you’ll need to set up an account first if you don’t already have one but can login directly from Outlook once set up), and give it a try!

We are very fortunate to have so many great Fans of Gist out there that share their experiences about our product.  We wanted to share a few of those mentions, blog posts, and articles here along with some of the great quotes they contain.  Thanks for the support!

Tim Skaggs – Harnessing your connections through the power of Gist

“If you haven’t heard of Gist you are missing out! This web application will give you a lot of power to manage all your social networks and emails under one roof.”

Office Arrow – Using CRM Tools to Manage Opportunities

“…Gist.com focuses primarily on learning more about prospective clients: when you add a new individual or company to Gist, the site searches Google and social media sites to bring together a whole profile for you to use when contacting that person or company.”

Technorati – Getting the Gist of Social Media Blogging

“I’ve installed the Outlook plugin. Now when I look at an e-mail from you, I can click on the Gist button in the top right corner and see all your contact information, online news articles that mention you, your RSS feeds, all the emails we’ve exchanged, every attachment we’ve exchanged, any links we’ve given each other, and your Twitter feed.  Just think how valuable this is when you’re talking with a client and they ask if you received an attachment. No more playing in your inbox! Just look in Gist, click on the Attachments tab, and you have a complete list of every attachment you’ve sent to, or received from, that client.”

WebWorkerDaily – Gist Profiles Help You Get Found

“The folks at Gist are now joining the social identity management space by unleashing this functionality to the masses — giving everyone the ability to create and share their own public profile. Now I can now use the data-gathering power of Gist to present a full dossier about me.”

What is Gist?  Gist founder & CEO T.A. McCann tells you what it is all about in less than two minutes.  This interview took place during the recent SIIA On-Demand conference where Gist was chosen to a be a “Preview Company” and is a quick overview of what we are doing and how we do it.  Enjoy!

Gist is a valuable part of your Relationship Toolbox

One of the best ways to improve your business relationships with Gist is to use it as a preparation tool to make your next meeting more successful.  You can do this several days ahead, as an everyday task, or “in-the-moment” when you’re looking to maximize those last few minutes in the coffee shop or a lobby before meeting a friend or business prospect.

Looking ahead to your week of meetings

Gist is a great tool to help you learn more about the people you will be meeting this week because it automatically creates profiles for each of the invitees in your Google or Outlook calendar. Limit the view of the Gist Dashboard to the people you will be meeting with this week by selecting Recent News > Contacts I’m meeting with this week.

Then, view news, blogs, and tweets for each of these contacts using the Gist Dashboard.

Reviewing content before today’s meeting

Gist creates a Dossier for each of your contacts – a printable briefing sheet that can give you all you need to know about that contact right before the meeting.  For example, here’s a Dossier for Brad Feld, annotated with a note from his Gist contact record.

The Gist Dossier gives you recent news, email, attachments you’ve shared, or the people that you and your contacts know in common.  You can even save it as a .pdf and send it as an email attachment.

On the go right before a meeting

Gist also goes with you on your iPhone.  Use the Gist iPhone app to review recent news about the person you’re meeting, review their photo to find them in a crowded room, or simply send them an email to tell them you’re running a few minutes behind.

Be more productive wherever you are

Gist makes your meetings more successful, whether you’re using it as a weekly reminder, daily docket, or “just-in-time” tool to make that last few minutes before the meeting productive.

Gist was honored to receive a “cool vendor in the high performance workplace” award from Gartner this year.  Given that we entered open beta (September 15) and we still have a long way to go to realize our vision it feels pretty good to be recognized at this level.  As part of that award, we got a booth and both Robert and I attended the event.  I was only here for 2 days and Robert will be there until it ends on Thursday, so go by and see him in the Cool Vendor Pavilion.

Some quick thoughts based on my experience include;

-       The cloud” is still very scary for most CIO/CTOs, but they are really grappling with what is means, how it can apply and how they can leverage it for benefit.  Despite the fact that they have been supporting sending email and documents “to the cloud” for years or that many of them have servers located in/managed by other companies, they somehow see this as different.

-       Google Apps for the Enterprise has arrived, big time – Michael Lock  (leads sales for Google Apps) gave a great presentation about the value of cloud based services (e.g. 68 major features in 2008 and 83 already in 2009 for Google apps vs. um, how many from Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, Office…?) as well as the additional benefits of hosted services (lower cost, security, management…) which was compelling.  He was followed by the CIO from the Motorola Handset Division who switched his 15,000 people from Exchange to Google earlier this year.  I also talked to the CIO for all of Motorola and she said they are likely to move the whole company over in the future.  This is major!

-     Also from Motorola – they are really embracing social media and encourage everyone across the organization to use the tools to get the most from their networks of coworkers, customers, partners, potential employees.  This was exciting, but there were lots of other people saying that they “lock down” the social web, seeing it as more time waster than competitive advantage (short sighted).

-     While many of the Gartner analysts were saying familiar things, they do have a new practice focused around the “customer centered web” which brings together lots of good angles from web2.0 to CRM.  Both times I heard Gene Phifer talk, he was very smart, had great data and laid out some specific plans for enterprises to embrace.  Another smart guy was David Cearley who understands the evolution of the CRM space and how tools like Twitter and Facebook can work for a company’s benefit.  Clearly Gist fits into this space as we can help everyone in the organization get a handle on who is saying what on all the different channels (email, web, blogs, twitter…) and can help get the most from your network. We plan to talk to these guys soon to get more detail on what they see happening in the most innovative and forward looking companies (the ones who will want to embrace Gist).

-     Despite these talks, most of the attendees seemed really “internally” focused vs. externally focused.  They still seem way more concerned about managing their servers, deploying some management software… vs. getting their people more engaged, connected and productive.  This is another good case for the cloud, where companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google are developing and deploying solutions that can be set up in minutes and cost $0 to manage.

-       The wi-fi in the halls sucked.  This is embarrassing since the place is filled with CIO/CTOs.  We also had a small booth and the wired connection was hard to get working (after the great work of a few of the staff).  IT FAIL.

-       There were <10% of the people who had laptops open during the presentations and the Twitter banter was pretty sparse (check out #GartnerSym for details).  Contrast this with a conference like Defrag where the levels of conversation are so much richer and the wifi is awesome (I hope).  We are really looking forward to seeing all our friends at Defrag this year in Denver (Nov 11-12).

-       Mark Hurd (HP CEO) is a masterful presenter.  He did a keynote/Q&A and he was awesome.  Great blend of data, process, humor, humility…and he even drew on a flip-chart to make more of his points.

-       The general mood was upbeat and enthusiastic.  Most people seem like they are looking forward, looking to invest in new solutions and will, over time, embrace the social web.

We wanted to share more exciting news from Gist. We have just released an iPhone application that puts all the news, updates, and information about your contacts and their companies in your hand.

The iPhone application gives you on-the-go access to information about your professional network with new features including:

• Optimized Dashboard – provides quick viewing of both traditional news sources as well as blogs and Twitter updates either by person or company.
• Event View – delivers automatically created and updated profiles of meeting attendees in a single view plus provides a map of the meeting location.
• Quick Actions – enable sharing of news, reaching out to a contact or even sending a one-click email to meeting participants th at you are running late.

Please try it out and let us know what you think – feedback@gist.com or support.gist.com!

Thanks to everyone including our thousands of new beta users for making our open beta launch last week a huge success.  We’ve worked very hard over the past year to building something that you would find truly innovative and we know we have more to add so please continue to provide outstanding feedback – feedback@gist.com or support.gist.com.

We received an amazing amount of coverage and here are a few articles and blog posts that have been written about us over the past week:

Mashable – Gist Launches: Sync Social Media Data with Email Connections

CNETWebware -Gist opens up, adds noise and friends filter

Forbes – Gist.com’s Beta Data

Lifehacker – Gist Filters Your Inboxes by Contact Importance

FilltheFunnel – Gist: Virtual Windshield to Your Connections

Salesforce and Gist – CRM Gets Social

Over the course of the past year, we have been collecting survey responses from those interested in trying out Gist.  We asked a lot of questions and really appreciate all the thoughtful responses.  Now that we are on the verge of open beta, we wanted to share what we learned with everyone.  Here are the highlights:

Prep time is either rare or too burdensome

• Almost 60% of those surveyed reported spending less than 10 minutes searching the web ahead of an important meeting
• Over 40% of those surveyed reported spending an hour or more searching the web ahead of an important meeting

Favorite sources of information lean toward new sources

• All use some type of search engine (Google, etc.)
• 75% reported spending time on LinkedIn
• Almost 50% use Facebook
• 15% use Twitter
• Less than 15% of those surveyed reference their CRM system
• Other sources include Hoovers, Zoominfo, Jigsaw, & company websites

Personal email stores continue to grow

• 75% of those surveyed by Gist reported having 2,000 or more emails saved with almost 40% having over 6,000.
• Almost 30% reported receiving between 40 and 100 emails per day
• Number of inboxes multiplying (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.)

We learned a lot of things about how people communicate and where they go (or don’t go) to get information to prepare for a meeting, call, or other type of interaction.  Mostly, what we learned reinforced what we are doing here at Gist.

Here are more detailed slides on the questions and responses.

We believe our users say it best and that is why we will be featuring video interviews here where they talk about their experience with Gist and how it has changed the way they go about building and managing relationships.

Our first interview is with Michael Michaels from here in Seattle.  Michael works in business development for recruiting firm Verticalmove and also organizes a really cool event called Seattle Job Social where job seekers and hiring companies come together and interact socially vs. a more traditional job fair.