Service Saturday: Zyb - Backup your Phone Contacts

Jibran Masud of Zyb recently wrote in asking me take a look at their service.

ZYB is a free online phone data backup service, launched in June 2006. ZYB allows user to store, manage, share and access mobile data online. We follow the open-standard remote synchronisation (syncML) platform and deliver our services across the globe for no fees whatsoever.

To get to know ZYB instantly, take a look at the movie.

The reasons of ZYB’s acceptability are - it is simple, secure, supports over 300 phones across all networks while it enables users to:

• Backup their mobile’s contacts and calendar
• Manage their mobile’s contacts and calendar online
• Share contacts and calendar with friends and family
• Import public calendars to mobile (Google Calendar import has just been launched, whereas full two-way synchronization between ZYB and Google calendar will be introduced later)
• Synchronize their mobile’s data with other devices and services (iPod, Outlook and others)

When speaking numbers, more than 3.2 million contacts have been uploaded to ZYB and growing every minute.

Recently Nordic Venture Partners has invested one million € in ZYB. And last week ZYB has announced partnership with Germany’s third largest mobile network operator E-Plus Mobilfunk GmbH & Co KG. Any plans on coming to India?

I’ve already signed up with Zyb. Signing up was easy. You need to provide your mobile number so that the can send you the activation code. This I received instantly.

They also send you settings which you can use to synchronize with Zyb. I did not receive these settings. This could be possible because I don’t have GPRS activated on my phone.

You are given manual instructions in case this fails.

I was hoping that this service would work even without GPRS. However, the functionality in this case is very limited. You can manually add contacts, however it can be a pain when you have over 200 contacts! It would be great to see some kind of import format, either a CSV file or business cards.

The interface is neat and easy to use. Once you have your contacts synchronized you can export them as VCF or VCS cards. Which makes me iterate the need to have import of these

You can also send the settings to your new mobile phone if you buy a new one, or lost your old phone.

Overall I really like the service. Would love to see new features implemented however. If you have GPRS enabled then I really recommend this. And seeing their features (as well as try out other services) I may actually activate GPRS!

My only concern was Privacy, but their Policy states that only you have access to the data.

Are you using Zyb? Let me know what you think about it.