Highrise is an online contact manager built by the famous 37 signals, founders of the ever popular Basecamp project management tool. It was quietly launched yesterday to the public.

Highrise tracks leads, clients and vendors, allowing users to stay on the ball with who gets spoken to, when, and about what. This allows for members of a team to easily decipher the next plans of action. Notes, calls, and tasks can each have reminders set to them for easily remembering to follow up. When signing up for Highrise, each user will get a unique email address, when items are sent to this email, they will automatically become tasks, taking the extra steps out of lining up items to be completed. HIghrise is at its most effective when an entire company works with this online tool. Employees can share vendor, clients, lead, and co-worker information to see what has been previously communicated, and what was acted upon.

Rates vary with Highrise. There is a free plan with 2 users and space for 25 contacts which is great to try out the software and see if it could fit in with your current operation. Then users can choose to upgrade to a basic plan that allows for 400MB of file storage and 5000 contacts for $24/month. If that isn't enough, $149/month can get you unlimited users, 20GB of storage, and up to 50,000 users.

Highrise is a great compliment to the other online software packages that 37 signals offers, as data is communicated effortlessly between all of them.

BigContacts is a web based contact manager where users can upload both personal and business contacts from Outlook of Excel and simply keep track of all contacts in one place. From playing around with the free beta version, this does have a lot of potential. On first glance of the demo, the screen seems a tad busy, and overwhelming. It looks like there is a lot going on, and I wasnt really sure where I should click first. BigContacts might have been better off by making things look a little simpler and less intimidating to o users. Then again, they are still developing this online solution, so I assume things will be changed around a bit when the full launch comes around. BigContacts has used the Web 2.0 application standard, Ajax to build this tool. There are a fair share of features and options that are offered, including Contact clouds that blow up names that have had more activity over another, and team activities that can be tracked through RSS feeds. The contact manager also has the ability to attach photos, notes and files with contacts, which is a great feature for remembering important details about a person. There is a group calendar and Skype integration as well. Last but not least, the BigContacts has the added bonus of being able to review your contacts from any web enabled phone, where users can also review and write notes and tasks. I will be playing with this a bit more to get a greater feel for it. I'm not totally sold on using this yet, but it does have serious potential as a contact manager. The beta is open to everyone and pricing will range from $59.95 for a 10 users account, to a Free 3 user account.