The rule is: You don’t do what’s already done. If you’re a 4-5 person startup with limited resources and little time in hand then you don’t mess around with testing small stuff, you concentrate on the main startup idea. Now if you have any past development experience then you surely know that sending out invites and importing contacts from your user’s hotmail, yahoo or Gmail’s address book is crucial and you don’t want to mess with that. So how about getting help and doing it with just a few API calls? This is what CloudSponge.com really is: They help you pull email address contacts from your user’s address books with just a few API calls. It’s a SaaS (Software as a Service) based model and really affordable for startups running tight on budget.

The problem with gathering contacts is the varying protocols across different services like hotmail, yahoo, gmail and others so if you want to take up that task then you have to code it yourself and that surely will take a lot of developer hours and would in the end count pretty expensive in terms of the hours wasted on developing it.

With CloudSponge.com you can access web mail accounts as well as contacts from desktop mail services like Outlook and Mac’s address book. The signup process is pretty simple and with setting up your billing and technical information of where the pulled up contacts would end up, you are all set to go! The current email services supported by CloudSponge.com includes seven popular email services like Yahoo, Gmail, Windows Live and Plaxo and more services would be added to eventually make this API universal meaning you won’t need anything else to pull contacts from your user’s address book no matter which service is used.

This video explains more:

With this easy to use API, development time is bound to decrease which will increase your productivity. So if were looking for an API to pull contacts from an email address and populate them for any kind of use, CloudSponge.com is for you. Sign up and start using it in minutes!