Thank you, Forbes and Diane Brady, for the interview! As I mentioned, contacts are a deceptively hard problem, but one with a really big impact. We are proud of our solution, Sunshine Contacts, available in the App Store.
Sunshine’s mission is to create advanced technologies that make mundane tasks effortless, free up your time, and make it easier to be thoughtful.
One of the key ways to let your friends and family know you are thinking of them is by remembering their birthday. Our new app, Sunshine Birthdays, makes sure that you never forget a birthday and it makes it easy to send a message or give a gift.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sunshine-birthdays/id1592003429
Sunshine Birthdays asks for access to your contacts, calendar, and Facebook. We find as many birthdays as we can and present them in a simple, easy-to-use chronological list.
You can turn notifications on and off by tapping the bell on the side of the person’s name. Sunshine will notify you 3 days before as well as on the birthday.
Additionally, if you like a weekly preview of upcoming birthdays, you can set up a weekly reminder email with an overview of all birthdays in the next two weeks.
Finally, Sunshine Birthdays makes it easy to celebrate your friends special day. You can send a text, eCard, or flowers. You can try out our gift concierge to get ideas for a birthday present and, once you choose one, get help delivering it.
We hope you find Sunshine Birthdays useful. Try it out and send us your feedback at helios@sunshine.com!
How do you make the mundane magical? Imagine if your contacts magically stayed up-to-date with no effort on your part. Or if the great photos you have of your friends got sent to them automatically. What if you never forgot another birthday?
The impossible is now possible. Smartphones have connected the world and put the entire internet into our pockets. We can get whatever we want delivered to our home whenever we want, sometimes by flying drone. With the rise of artificial intelligence, dreams of virtual assistants, self-driving cars and global facial recognition are no longer that far-fetched. However, despite transformational advances in technology, there are still tons of mundane, time-consuming tasks that we all do (or just don’t do) daily.
Sunshine’s technology will make the mundane effortless, free up your time, and make it easier to be thoughtful.
Every day, we muddle through tasks with technology that is “good enough” – contacting friends with stale information that may or may not reach them; searching through email for phone numbers and addresses that we know we have somewhere; manually and painstakingly creating group distribution lists for every occasion; scheduling time to get together with friends using a hodge-podge of calendar, email, and text; pinching and zooming through photos to find one with everyone’s eyes open. We’re used to the mess, and we’ve come to accept the friction.
No more. Everyday things should just work, and that’s Sunshine’s mission. We’re creating technology to address practical, everyday pain points in the basic, foundational tools that connect us with the people we care about. Ultimately, Sunshine will remove complexity in things like contact management, scheduling, event organization, and group communication so you can spend time more meaningfully.
We want to put the focus back on people, and let technology advance in its sophistication and fade into the background.
Today, we’re launching Sunshine Contacts (see our announcement here). Leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, Sunshine Contacts finds, deduplicates, and organizes your contacts. Using a variety of sources, we ensure your contact list is in one place, organized, always complete, and up-to-date. Sunshine Contacts makes your contacts just work.
Sunshine Contacts is our foundation. When your contacts are organized and truly work, they create a flywheel where scheduling, planning, organizing, and being thoughtful about your relationships becomes infinitely easier. When your contacts are complete, comprehensive, and accurately reflect relationships, you can spend your time building meaningful connections and shared experiences. Our future suite of products will make it effortless to keep in touch with the people in your life on a personal and professional level in a thoughtful way.
This is just the beginning. Sunshine is building a suite of services to solve the common pain points that modern technology hasn’t addressed.
At Sunshine, we strive to make the mundane magical. Our vision is to support your day-to-day life – to eliminate time spent on “technology” and simply make things better. Easier. If this means you save some “screen time” and give more thought to the most important people in your life, then we’ll know we’ve done it right.
We can’t wait to show you what’s next.
– Marissa and Enrique
Sunshine Contacts automatically creates a comprehensive set of your personal and professional contacts from disparate places like your phone, online address books, and email. Your previously, static messy contact cards are then magically organized and updated with the latest info.
Going a step further, Sunshine Contacts, with your permission, uses location data to better understand where you spend time and who you might want to share your contact info with. Plus, our system is constantly checking for new info as well as changes to your existing contacts to ensure you’re up-to-date.
Best of all, when you want to contact someone, Sunshine gives you the relevant context – like your most recent email exchange – so you have the right information at the right time for the friend, family member, or colleague you’re reaching out to.
Sunshine Contacts makes contacts just work.
Sunshine Contacts is currently offered by invitation. Here is what you can expect once you’ve received an invitation:
Before on iPhone Contacts
After on Sunshine
At Sunshine, we are working on life’s practical, everyday problems. We’re starting by tackling your contact list, and over time we’ll solve event organization and group photo sharing too. It’s our mission to address these pain points for you so you can spend your time more meaningfully.
– Marissa and Enrique
