There are a plethora of contact management apps on the market that allow you to make sense of your email and mobile contacts. In fact, if you do a search for “contact management” on the iPhone App Store; there are over 50 apps in the results. Today, directory services provider WhitePages is throwing its hat in the ring with the private beta launch of Hiya, which includes free iPhone and web applications.
With Hiya, you can import your contacts from Gmail (and soon Yahoo, Outlook, Facebook, Hotmail, Blackberry, etc.) and the app will combine your contacts and clean up the data. Its technology will recognize nicknames, misspellings, duplicates, and more.
If you find that your contact information is still incomplete Hiya will send emails to friends, family, and colleagues to correct and fill in missing contact info that you have for them. Unsurprisingly, Hiya also leverages WhitePages’ database to fill in missing contact info like postal address, cell phone, and landline data.
And once your contacts are imported and scrubbed in Hiya, you’ll have the option to sync with any of your original sources (i.e. Gmail). Another advantage of using the app is that all of your data is backed up, so if you lose your iPhone, you can easily import the data back into your phone with Hiya.
Much of the functionality included Hiya is standard to competitors offerings, including Soocial and others. But one advantage Hiya offers is the ability to sync with WhitePages and populate info from the company’s vast database of information.