It's been in the works for awhile, but we are now proud to announce the release of More Birthdays v1.0, an iPhone app that we conceptualized, designed, and developed in collaboration with the American Cancer Society. It went live in the iTunes app store on November 30, 2009, and you can check it out by clicking this link to get More Birthdays, or simply search for More Birthdays. It's a free app that helps you remember upcoming birthdays from your contacts and Facebook account.

Why do we need this sort of app? There are a lot of "Birthday" themed apps in the store, and ours is certainly not the first. The American Cancer Society has claimed the right to be the "Official Sponsor of Birthdays." We think their goal to fight cancer and thus promote a world with more birthdays is a pretty good cause. When first proving our concept for this app, we did a lot of research centered on how people use apps and computers to help them remember important dates. It used to be a lot simpler, but in our digital age of "friending" co-workers, neighbors, casual acquaintances, our human networks have grown thanks to computers and mobile devices. We are simply more connected than ever before, and yet it's easy to let the birthday of someone close to you get lost in the cyber shuffle.

More Birthdays uses Push Alerts to remind you of daily or weekly upcoming birthdays. This is important because you don't have to actively seek the info out in the app, your chosen frequency of alerts will ping you and tell you whose day is coming up. You can then launch the app and use it to send a quick Birthday email to a friend or contact. It was also important to us to keep redundant data entry to a minimum. Hence the Facebook Connect functionality for Facebook users. Hit the Connect button, log-in, and you can import all of your FB Friends into the same database as your other contacts.

Check it out, and let us know what you think? Any suggestions for future releases?