We admit it: We have been waiting far too long to implement one of the most requested features you asked for – SMS analytics !

But as of yesterday, with Handy Elephant beta 0.7 available on the Android Market, we have closed that book. We now give you multi-channel social analytics for SMS and phone calls into the palm of your hands, which makes Handy Elephant twice as useful. You can see when your last chat was with a person, regardless if it was per sms or phone call!

Of course, we summarise the whole log visually for you across channels. You can see in the screenshot below, that calls, which are slightly more effort and tend to deliver better results, are highlighted in shades of orange. Your text message communications, usually short and precise information exchange, are drawn in shades of blue. The lighter shades of both channels always represent your incoming communications, the darker ones are the outgoing efforts you made.

And it doesn’t stop there – you can even see what you talked and wrote about. When making and taking lots of calls, it’s easy to forget what a particular conversation was about. Taking notes on pen and paper or on your laptop can be tricky when on the move. With our handy note-taking feature, you can note important details at the end of each call. You’ll have an easy and automatic record of your conversations.
And for text messages, we give you access to the full message you sent or received, directly within Handy Elephant.

We hope, you will enjoy these new features as much as we do. And please give us feedback on anything you think we should improve, we welcome any comments

We’ve been working hard on a new version of Handy Elephant which was released this week! The app has been completely redeveloped, making it more stable and easier to improve in the future with new features. A number of new features have been added:

Try the new version here!

In the last few weeks we have seen growing concern among smartphone users over their data privacy. A media frenzy over allegations that iPhone and Android phones track and store their location has led people to think twice about how they use such devices. Smartphone manufacturers have been forced to clarify exactly how personal data is used and stored.

In a recent blog post, Neil McCallister argues that mobile app developers need to do the same. Many apps are great precisely because they take our data and do interesting or helpful things with it. But that potential can also be exploited in ways that users aren’t happy with, without their knowledge. In order to gain their trust, developers need to uphold their right to privacy, and be upfront about how personal data may be used.

At Handy Elephant we agree, and take our user’s privacy very serious. So, in the name of honesty and transparency, we’d like to clarify exactly how we use your personal data.

Thanks everyone for being so enthusiastic about our new Personal CRM beta 0.6.x for Android !

In the last 3 weeks, we easily breached the 1000 downloads barrier, we are growing with 40% every week and had fantastic retention rates of about 60% for new users .

Also, we would like to say thank you for all the positive feedback we received, it really gave us a push and we are working on a few new features like analysing your text message interactions as well

But first of all, we will release an update this evening which makes Handy Elephant much more stable. We saw that about 4% of all attempts to start Handy Elephant lead to a crash – far too much for us.

Watch out for tonight’s update and keep letting us know how we can improve Handy Elephant !

Since app downloads and usage are still developing well, we are now looking for an experienced software engineer with entrepreneurial spirit, who can join our team as full-on co-founder in a CTO position.

More details here, please get in touch with us as soon as possible – response guaranteed.

The number of downloads have developed well over the last few days. When we released our beta 0.6.1 update last week, Handy Elephant personal CRM peaked in the Top 150 of all Free Business Apps for Android.

This is great news for us, after the long time it has been quiet around Handy Elephant. Due to great feedback so far, that is closely aligned with what we planned for future releases, we accelerated the development of certain features.

Soon, the handy little elephant in your mobile should become a whole lot smarter. We look forward to our next updates.

Since October, we have been preparing the release of a new-style “personal contact relationship management” app for Android.

After the invaluable feedback we received for the (now closed) Handy Elephant web application (THANK YOU to everyone who signed up), we completely rethought how an application (on the web or mobile phones) can enable people to increase their networking and relationship management productivity.

We ended up focusing on the one line, that we heard consistently throughout the feedback process: “Tell me something I don’t know“. The goal was do identify measures about peoples’ networks and relationships, which

• make staying in touch more efficient
• enable people to see which people reciprocate
• generaly help making decisions on how much effort to put into a certain relationship
• can be calculated without any (or minimum) input by the user (fully automated).

We incorporated these three goals in our Personal CRM for Android – it automatically analyses the call log and gives you new insights into your network in a dashboard style attempt. Check out the screenshots below.

Networking Dashboard – Measure social efforts and results

Contact Portfolio Rankings – Follow up in time and see who matters

Relationship Analytics – Indepth analysis of your relationships

The app is now available, get it here for FREE. Again, tell us what you love and hate about the app – we will improve it continously.

And since this is just a new beginning, there are many new features to come – stay tuned.

[wpfblike]The following post is a reblog from the Strategic Networking Blog (get the original article here). It is reblogged because it highlights several issues, on which solutions from Handy Elephant will target.

130 is the average number of friends that users on facebook have, 50% of all 500 million active users log in daily to interact with their friends. They post updates, share links and fotos, comment on just about anything – being social is in.

And looking at how other parts of our life, that have been primarily our own issues before, get rethought and made social, there does not seem to be any way around social in the long run as well. Groupon is leading the social shopping front, and Google has been exploring social search for a while.

Mark Zuckerberg is right saying, that being social and interacting with other people is one of our most important personal needs, especially since human’s do not have to worry about survival and safety constantly anymore – food to live from and a lockable door are ubiquitous to most people developed countries.

But with this, there are a few emerging challenges, which have formerly been recognised:

• We cannot grow our network to an unlimited size. In fact, with about 150 people, we can just remain an overview of a fairly low number of people. Once our list of friends exceeds this number, we have troubles staying in touch with them – or we spend more time on our social life than we should.
• Where in the old days, we replace about half of our friends every 7 years, because people moved to other places and contact details became outdated (therefore relationships were lost), this is not exactly happening anymore. Profiles on social networks never change – and are even always up to date. Where our best friends might still get replaced by others at times, the total number of people we can stay in touch with (and do every once in a while) is constantly growing. Or do you delete friends on Facebook or LinkedIn regularly?
• Whenever we decide to do something, we base our decisions on expected returns, but in social life returns are much more complex to measure than for example in purchase decisions. And with the overwhelming number of social interactions, due to a lot of our daily life now involving social web or mobile apps, it is very hard to loose track of what we do and what we get from it.

This blog attempts to explore these challenges, discuss potential solutions and will introduce readers to technology which can simplify their social life – not only for the sole purpose of having a better overview, but being more efficient in making and managing new, useful relationships.

It sees networking as the art of making and managing relationships – and where the interaction part is mostly of operational nature, strategic networking shall be the process of taking a step back, analysing our networking efforts and aligning them towards the bigger picture (e.g. looking at if our efforts are worth the returns and re-aligning our efforts towards our goals), in order to achieve our goals quicker and more efficient – with our network and without cutting down on social life.