Gist : Know better what you already know 

Gist is a web based tool that intelligently sums up the vast information a user has in and needs from his/her email, social networking sites, CRM tools and search engines. Gist Inc., a Seattle based company headed and founded by T.A. McCann has opened Gist for public beta since 15 Sept, 2009 after an approximate 1 year of private beta testing by around 10,000 testers. Gist amalgamates email with rest of the web to organize, prioritize and present to you the information that matters the most to you. Gist has collaborated with Outlook, Salesforce, g-mail, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Email/IMAP. You need to upload your profiles by adding these applications to your Gist account and the rest will be taken care by Gist.   

Whom is GIST going to benefit? 

This is looked upon as a Personal Relationship Manager which will make life easier for professionals who are overwhelmed with their flooded mail box and scattered information all over the web. Most of the time, business professionals need some information about an important contact and the events related to them.  For instance it’s a very frequent practice to have a look on the profile of people (May be a potential client) whom you are going to have a meeting or call with. It might become a tedious task to update you with information about such contacts by searching in Google, their Linkedin, Facebook profiles. Let’s see how Gist will solve this concern. 

What does Gist offer? 

• Depending upon the frequency and type of communication you have had Gist comes out with the most important profiles (both individual and company).
• It automatically generates a profile of various contacts by taking information from their profile in Linkedin, Facebook and also from the news and blogs associated with them on the web.
• It enables you to share news, blogs, contact details via Twitter, Facebook.
• Gist dashboard includes upcoming events, attachments involved in previous communications, list of important contacts and companies, events revolving, recently shared.
• Apart from the automatic organization of various information, you can have a customized organization by grouping your contacts, tagging them, increasing or decreasing the automatically set importance of a contact. The Gist generated profile can be viewed by clicking on the contact name.
• You can see contact’s blogs, news related to them and their public tweets that Gist pulls from twitter.
• There are various criterion on which a contact or information can be searched like search based on the updates on contact since 24 hrs, 48 hrs, 30 days and so on till 90 days. Search can also be performed on the basis of contacts added recently or depending on the person with whom the upcoming meeting is scheduled which is based on calendar info available.
• One of the most appreciated feature is you can use this tool as a plug-in with Outlook and Salesforce.com. If you see any contacts in your mails and want to get some info about him/her, you can get it there and then using Gist with the help of profile generated by it. You need not go out of the Outlook or Salesforce window.
• CSV can be uploaded as well. 

This is a much awaited step towards integration of social media and CRM and is available for free but there is an advanced version that is coming up which will be chargeable. 

Log on to http://www.gist.com/ to have a first hand experience of one of the most innovative mashups that we have seen off-late.

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