French business media are reporting that Viadeo, the professional social network challenging LinkedIn in a number of countries, has acquired Soocial, a Dutch contact management, syncing and backup service provider (via Journal Du Net).

The service basically lets users sync all their contacts across their smartphones, email accounts and computers, and lets them manage, clean up and share contacts from their digital address books.

Soocial has been around for quite a while – Erick reviewed them back in April 2008 – and is probably best known for blatantly hasseling the Hoff.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Les Echos says the transaction was worth ‘multiple hundreds of thousands of euros’.

Viadeo claims its business social network has over 40 million registered users and is likely looking to expand the number of services it can offer its members in the future.

Update: the news is now official:

As part of the acquisition, Soocial’s development staff will be joining Viadeo to work towards improving overall user experience on the Viadeo professional social network.

Also read: As Viadeo Shelves IPO, LinkedIn Set To Begin Trading On Thursday (May 2011)

French business media are reporting that Viadeo, the professional social network challenging LinkedIn in a number of countries, has acquired Soocial, a Dutch contact management, syncing and backup service provider (via Journal Du Net).

The service basically lets users sync all their contacts across their smartphones, email accounts and computers, and lets them manage, clean up and share contacts from their digital address books.

Read more on TechCrunch Europe.

Here’s how the story started: Soocial, an angel investor-backed startup that provides a simple but powerful contact synchronization service for both the Web and mobile phones, figured ‘hassle-free address book management’ fit its core product perfectly as a description when it was founded about two years ago.

As a gimmick, they associated the baseline with the freedom-looking Knight Rider and Baywatch actor and started using images and footage of the Hoff as part of their marketing message (see video below).

Turns out Hasselhoff wasn’t all too pleased with the unauthorized use of his image, prompting him to have his lawyers send a cease and desist letter to the fledgling company. The message was clear: Soocial was to remove all images of David Hasselhoff from its website, videos and business cards or legal action would ensue.

First, the startup tried to stall the process by delaying any response to letters or e-mail that was sent to them, and (unsuccessfully) attempted to make personal contact with the celebrity more than once. They ended up getting Hasselhoff’s agent excited by planting the idea of producing official endorsement videos for Soocial, featuring the actor, in his head.

The initial excitement ebbed away rather swiftly when the agent learned that Soocial wasn’t able to actually pay for those videos: he wanted $250,000, close to the total of capital that has been injected into the startup by angel investors to date.

Soocial didn’t give up and instead took it up a notch: they offered Hasselhoff equity in the company in exchange for a potential endorsement, and tried to sweeten the deal by playing the card of much-needed positive publicity that would ensue should the actor support a small, innovative company.

The Hoff didn’t bite, and Soocial stopped using unlicensed material for marketing purposes.

Guess it just wasn’t worth the hassle.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=834214&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=c9ff23&fullscreen=1

In essence, Soocial enables you to sync contacts (and contacts only) between computers, over 400 types of mobile phones and web applications like Gmail and Highrise. Soocial also provide tools to manage these contacts, backups, and keeps your current address book in sync and up to date with all your devices. Up until now, the service only supported the Mac OS X Address Book client.

Later today, at the Under the Radar conference in San Francisco, Soocial will announce support for Outlook and Blackberry, which will evidently make the service far more appealing to business users. They will have to be patient, though, as the release of the Blackberry client is planned for the coming weeks, while the Outlook version is considered an alpha release.

CEO Stefan Fountain says Soocial aims to become “the address book for the internet-as-an-operating-system”. He added that future plans for Soocial include widening their platform support to popular services like Windows Live, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn and devices like the iPhone.

If you want to find out more, check out this video of Fountain’s presentation at FOWA London, recorded last month.

Soocial is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and has raised 300,000 Euros from angel investors. The company was founded in November, 2006 by Stefan Fountain and Daniel Spronk.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=834214&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
Hassle Free from Soocial on Vimeo.

Okay, making Plaxo look lame isn’t that hard. But as Plaxo has been groping around the past year trying to turn itself into a social network to attract a buyer (cough, Comcast), a little startup in the Netherlands called Soocial has been building a kick-ass contact management service that syncs all of your contacts between your desktop, cell phone, and a growing list of Web services. This company won one of the vote-in demo spots at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam (CEO Stefan Fountain pictured above), and their video demo featuring David Hasselhoff (shown below) stole the show. TechCrunch has 300 invites to the beta that you can grab here.

Soocial is not yet everything it could be, but it has a lot of potential, and its approach to syncing contacts is the right one. Right now, it supports an impressive 400 phones, contacts in Gmail, 37Signals’ Highrise CRM app, and contacts in your Mac address book on your desktop. (You gotta love a startup whose beta software works only on a Mac.) Support for Outllook on Windows machines is coming soon, as is syncing with LinkedIn, and contacts in Windows Live and Yahoo.

With all of these services and devices, if you add a contact in one, it updates your contact list and details everywhere else. This two-way syncing is what is really impressive. It even works with the iPhone, although only by syncing through iTunes on the desktop. Soocial also has a lame Facebook app, because Facebook does not allow syncing of contacts yet.

As more services open up with data portability and open APIs, Soocial will add them as well. All Soocial wants to do is sync your contacts no matter where you keep them. It is not trying to be a social network, and it is not trying to grow by spamming its users friends. “Not everybody has friends, but everybody has contacts,” says Fountain.

The startup is based in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and has raised 300,000 Euros from angel investors. It was founded in November, 2006. The business model is unclear, but the founders hope to be able to charge subscriptions to power users. Enjoy the video:

Hassle Free from Soocial on Vimeo.

(Photo by Anne Helmond)