Few days ago I had a pleasure to talking with my friend and co-founder of contails.com – Romuald Szwarc. Today I present this interview… 14 quick questions and much faster answers. So… let’s talk.

I know Romuald for a few years now. He is a man of enthusiasm, a man obsessed by functionality and usability. Since a year or two… he’s a man obsessed by JavaScript, too. He’s an author of blog about JavaScript – keemor.com.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I’d like to present you a very special treat: an interview with co-founder of Contails – Mr Romuald Szwarc…

Hello Romek. Firstly, introduce yourself…

I’m a web developer for few years now. I started from PHP and everything that is around it. Last year I moved towards Python and PrototypeJS library for front end development. My main goal in every day work is to stay open minded for various points of view. I live in Gdańsk in Poland. I’m fond of kitesurfing which lets me forget about the whole world.

OK, lets get down to the nitty gritty. You are the founder of contails.com. What is it exactly? What made you start it?

The main idea of Contails is to easily aggregate contacts’ details from different sources like webpages, desktop and mobile devices into one contact with as many informations as possible. Then you can make backup of them, copy contacts between applications and share them with friends.

And… the most important quesiton: is it free?

Yes, now it’s all free. In near future we’re about to launch paid account plans for advanced users which will for example provide bigger limits for contacts and mobiles amount in one account.

So, it’s free. However… do you really think that users trust web-based applications? They trust them enough to entrust them their contacts?

I’m sure that some people don’t and they will use desktop applications for a long time. On the other hand your computer can get damaged or stolen anyway, so why not have secure online backup which you can access  from almost any (we decided to drop IE6 support) browser?

Tell us something about security. Is this app really safe? What are you doing to ensure the security?

Starting from hardware we use EC2 Amazon service which provides 99.99% of uptime of servers. Connection to Contails is always SSL encrypted during logging in. The user part of services can always be encrypted as on option. The thing that is unique in compare with competitors is every day McAfee SECURE scan which detects wholes and possible system backdoors.

What about competitors? I think that projects like zyb, mobyko or even plaxo are much similar to this one. Don’t you think that this niche is already overloaded?

We don’t want to become an online life stream with lots of options and complicated overloaded interface. What we want is to provide gathering, finding, making backup, synchronization and sharing of contacts which is 100% secure. Only so much and so many. We’re also seriously looking towards B2B platform to organize contacts for companies.

What about users’ reactions? Has anybody ever told you anything negative about contails.com?

Hmmm, no, not really. The main issue is to make mobile sychronization work with so many different devices. We never left users on their own with the problem. If they contact our support and tell us what doesn’t work we’re able to help them and ourselves as well to support more and more phones.

I know that you launched contails.com in february of 2009. Lots of people told then, that one of the best benefit of using contails is its easy-to-use and… multi-language interface. Now when I look at the contails.com I see just two languages – polish and english. Why is that?

After the launch, we made interface tests with users which showed that it’s too complicated. We spent some time to change Contails in a way which meets users’ expectations. During this process a lot of translations run out of date so we turned them off at all. Now as the main core of site won’t change so much we can come back to the internalization aspect.

Do you have any assumptions? How many users would you like to have and when?

As many as possible of course I think that breaking 20000 till the end of the year would be an optimistic sign for future.

And now there is… how many registered users?

More than 2000.

Ok, so how would you like to reach that kind of quantity? Have you got any plans for a promotion? I found your blog already, but it’s so poor right now.

Since Contails is free, we don’t want to spend fortune for online ads right now. We keep in touch with bloggers and magazines to spread the word about the site. Viral marketing videos is a quite sexy way for promotion too. You won’t believe for how many ways you can lost your mobile with all your the contacts. As for blog I can promise we’ll improve it.

What about the future of contails.com? Will it evolve or stay the same?

During next month we’ll launch finding any contact in Contails and make possible to ask the owner to share it. That’s all I can say for now, but
we have plenty more ideas how to improve Contails and we surely won’t stop developing them.

What would you say to someone who is interested in tool to manage his contacts, but he can’t decide what to choose. Contails or maybe some other tool?

That’s tough one. All I can say is if you don’t try you won’t know what you are missing

Lets finish up now… and the last question: do you use contails?

I can’t image making the product which I don’t belive in and I don’t use.

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At the end… from the author of this blog: I was related with the project contails.com. I was related as a beta tester, as well as a consultant and an author of sync engine, which is used in contails. I didn’t create this project, but I was close to it.