You’ve just come back from a conference. Your messenger bag is full of cards, emails on scraps of paper and a hastily-folded cocktail napkin with the name and phone number of an important CEO. You sit down, ready to turn all of this information into usable data, only to realize a week later that the stack of papers, cards and the napkin are still on your desk because you’ve been too busy to get them organized.

What’s the Problem?

As business professionals, we’re constantly looking for ways to make this information-to-data transition easier. If you could simply get the information that you need into the place that you need it, when you need it, so much of your process would be streamlined. Yet almost every cloud-based service has flaws or missing features that leave your problems as problems instead of a solution.

A big part of the issue is that of data portability. Software companies see your data as their possession, and they want to dictate what you can do with it. But why does it have to be this way?

In the end, we are left with a painful fact – The cloud is killing our productivity. We have contacts everywhere, yet almost none of them can be merged neatly into something that makes sense for us in our workflow. LinkedIn connections, Twitter followers, Facebook groups…in the world of the cloud, none of these know that the others exist.

What’s the Solution?

[getImage id=”” class=”alignright size-medium wp-image-7443″ src=”/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Screen-Shot-2013-08-09-at-10.05.02-AM-201×300.png” width=”201″]The fact of the matter is that you’re working harder than ever, but the systems that you are using are failing you. It’s not your fault, it’s your software. You have data everywhere and that data is locked behind closed doors. The systems that we use are supposed to be about us, but that’s rarely the case. Though they may appear to cater to our needs and solve our problems on the surface, we often find other issues arise as we become more dependent upon the work that they do.

The hard truth is this – If companies approached the crafting of solutions with customer satisfaction as the long-term goal then the results would be much different than what we typically see today.

The problems that we’ve discussed here, and FullContact’s methods of solving them are what brought me to the company. Behind the scenes, there is a group of 30-some people who take your data very seriously. You’ll note that I said your data, because we approach every problem with the understanding that we are only being asked to keep your data safe, to organize it and to help you become the superstar that you are determined to be.

We love what we do, and we love why we’re doing it. We value your feedback more than we can possibly say, and we’re extraordinarily excited to share our new products with you. Whether you’re a developer, crafting the best social information within your app, a salesperson who is constantly on the hustle or a connector who is trying to manage thousands of contacts that you think of as friends, we are here for you.

Moving forward, we’ll be gathering and producing the absolute best content that we can find, then sharing it with you. You’ll start seeing more activity here on the FullContact blog, as well as our Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and even App.net accounts. We want your feedback, your input and we hope to earn your trust. At FullContact, we have big goals, and we know that it will take all of these factors to make them happen. Thanks for coming along, and thank you for being a FullContact customer, whether you already are, or you will be.

Image Credit – vectorfunk, via Flickr