Tech executives: Time is of the essence

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The central theme of the When 2.0 conference is time, and how it relates to different services and applications. In one extrapolation of this, Mitch Kapor, president and chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation, talked about "stamping" tasks or events, or annotating them with meaning in time, with a beginning and end, a structure and notes. Without giving much more detail, he said this functionality will be part of an upcoming version of an open-source personal identify manager code-named Chandler. Chandler integrates calendar, e-mail, contact management, task management, notes and IM.

Video: Not just calendars anymore
At When 2.0, a discussion about developing software that can help people manage their time.

"This will be experimental at first...No one has figured out a great way to do this," Kapor said during an early panel called "Schedules and Calendars."

Microsoft's chief technical officer, Ray Ozzie, said he spends most of his day managing and juggling things. The home calendar, he said, is a "convenient place to communicate with my wife" and maintain a work schedule, which he prints out before the beginning of each day. "I jot notes down on that paper about meetings during the day," he said, having to write them down again later.

Microsoft, Bjordahl said in a later interview, has made a "significant investment" in its calendar program for the next release of Outlook, which is version 12 and is scheduled for late 2006. Since Outlook's first release in the late 1990s, its calendar component has largely been neglected in favor of improvements to e-mail, he said. But the coming version, which is available in beta release, will include a "cleaner, frictionless" user interface design and improved support for the industry de facto standard Internet Calendar Protocol, with bolstered sharing capabilities.

While major companies like Microsoft are making improvements, several upstarts are trying to capture the opportunity. Here's a look at some players.

• Renkoo. One of the hot names at the conference, the 9-month-old Silicon Valley company hasn't launched its product yet, but it showcased a Web site that CEO Adam Rifkin said it plans to launch early next year. Renkoo is a quasi-lightweight version of Evite, the event site, but rather than specializing in large groups or set events, the site will let people schedule and plan events with a small group of friends, e.g., a dinner out, an afternoon movie or a beer after work with friends. Visitors can create a small profile, query friends about a proposed gathering and negotiate the details with them over the Web, e-mail or a mobile phone via SMS (short message service). The company plans to make money by advertising.

• Zvents. Menlo Park, Calif.-based Zvents, which launched in October, is capitalizing on the absence of a powerful event search engine on the Internet. (It even demonstrated its search engine to Google executives attending the conference.)

The upstart lets people search for thousands of events by location, time and theme. People can view the results in the form of a map, a list or a calendar; and then save events to a personal calendar or export it by RSS (really simple syndication). Then visitors can view the monthly or daily events of their social contacts, or by social filter. That way, a user could presumably meet up with a friend or family member easily. Finally, the site is designed to make it easy for people to embed a social or specific event calendar (like that of a baseball team) into a blog. The free service collects fees from event organizers or local advertisers.

• Trumba. A Seattle-based software upstart, Trumba showed off its event-publishing tools at the event, as well as trumpeting a partnership with newspaper company Knight Ridder. The company develops and sells tools to publishers like Knight Ridder and Tribune Company (a pilot tester), and those tools let the sites aggregate and display information on local events. Visitors can add new events, save and export events to a personal calendar, share a scheduled calendar with friends and e-mail events to friends.

Still, some attendees were uncertain of the market opportunity.

"I'm surprised that there's so many people here doing the same thing, but it makes me wonder whether it is such a pain-point as everyone says," said one attendee. "Outlook works pretty well for me, and families work well with paper (calendars)."

[Bong Dizon]

Uh, we have PDAs

In essence, there's nothing truly new about this technology. We've had PDAs and PIM software for over a decade now. This "new" technology is just about making these existing devices and software smarter and more connected.

[Acpinho1]

Excel and Paper work for me

I use a small Excel macro I bought on a website and allows me to post Paper calendars on the office wall that everybody understands.

Sometime, paper is still your best friend, even if create it on a PC.

http://www.officehelp.biz/officehelp/viewcontents.asp?cl=Macro&id=00002&ent=Cal

[aaroberts]

The Future is now

Network solutions hosts my site and they give you 50 email addresses with the package, which also includes a mini office product... which ALSO includes a shareable calendar.

I uploaded my calendar from outlook at home to my calendar on the web and now my entire family can update it.

I imagine I could download it to work, but I don't want my personal stuff in my work calendar.

[Don_Dodge]

They all want to "own" your calendar

As Ray Ozzie pointed out in his SSE blog "announcement" the problem with most of the existing calendar solutions is that they all want to "own" the calendar. Meaning, they all want to import events from other calendars, but they don't want to export or synch with other calendars. This approach forces the user to have yet another calendar, when what they really want is to have their existing calendars synch with each other, and with selected friends and colleagues. This is the problem SSE was designed to fix.

There are some cool start-ups working on the calendar problem including; Timebridge, Trumba, Zvents, Kalookoo, and others. I did a review of the calendar problem and the various approaches of these and other start-ups in my blog today. You can see the whole story at http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/12/time_for_calend.html

More than that

They want to own your time. The "future" described in this article seems silly. Online sharable & open standard calendar programs will not solve any problems that my Day Planner or PDA doesn't already address. If this is the direction that Ray Ozzie and other visionaries are thinging, then the set of problems that IT can solve is getting thin indeed.

[jjocke]

This Killer App almost exists

Where many of the attempts to create a truly useful application fail is that once an event is entered into a calendar, it is a static piece of information. If the details change i.e. time, date or location - there is no way to automatically alert the people with that event in the calendar of the change.

Infuzer (www.infuzer.com) has addressed this issue with a pretty unique solution that is also cross-platform compatible. They keep a central store of the most up to date information on the events and regularly sync the entries to make sure that any changes are sent to everyone with that event in their calendar. They also have devised a way to enter events remotely to other people's Outlook, Palm or Lotus calendars once an approval between calendar users has been established.

These guys are on the cusp of something big and with their win for the NBC Olympics website, they are set to become a much more ballyhooed outfit.

[mcnevich]

We shouldn't have to go online...

I would love to see an app that opens directly to my daily schedule as soon as my computer starts up, with page tabs for maybe the next 7 days and tabs for all months...it shouldn't be necessary for me to go to a google/yahoo/msn etc. site, sign in, and then get to my calendar.

[cndkc]

Duh

Sounds like M/S Outlook to me.

[czorrilla]

History re-written

Stefanie Olsen seems to ignore that it was Louts who really introduced an useful electronic calendar and organizer in the pc.

[jamie.p.walsh]

Just create an XML standard like RSS did for blogs and news.

Create a calendar schema or event tag.

While we're at it, why doesn't the W3C standardize an ADDRESS format and a PHONE format. When web programmers tag data as address or phone number, the browser can use it to add it to contacts or dial it right out of the document.

Why has this not become as ubiquitous as the hyperlink yet?

[cndkc]

Just?

WRT to phones, it isn't that ubiquitous yet because only expensive (mobile) phones could use it. Maybe there is a market for bluetooth enabled desk/house phones that can interact with you PC/PDA to make it happen.

[208774626618253979477959487856]

go tech!

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