The meeting scheduler utility TimeBridge is growing up and expanding its mission. No longer just a schedule helper, the service is getting more tools to keep meetings that have already started running on time.
The company is still selling an online meeting product, based on DimDim. It's adding now a tool to let attendees collaborate on the agenda beforehand (I doubt it will ever get used, people are too lazy), and more importantly, it's getting a nag feature that will let a meeting organizer set the service to ping people via SMS or e-mail right before a meeting starts. Once a meeting is underway, there's also a new option to nag laggards to show up, again via SMS or e-mail.
The TimeBridge Web and e-mail UIs are cleaned up a little.
(Credit: TimeBridge)The ping features have a feedback mechanism as well. Messages come with short URLs that direct to response page that includes quick-reply options such as "Be there in 5 minutes" or "Sorry I can't make it." Unfortunately, "Sorry but I have to vacuum my cat" is not in the quick list, but you can type whatever you want as a reply instead. The ping feature will eventually be part of the paid TimeBridge Plus service for $8.95 a month, but it's free at the moment.
The iPhone and other mobile interfaces for TimeBridge let you gracefully (or not) bow out of a meeting.
(Credit: TimeBridge)There's also a very interesting new iPhone app for TimeBridge currently pending approval at Apple. It lets you scan your agenda (with a time line for your meeting), or ping the late people. You can also use the iPhone app to dial in to a TimeBridge conference call directly.
The service gets a cleaned-up user interface overall, which should help reduce the annoyance that people may feel when they get TimeBridge invitations but aren't familiar with the service. And there's an improved way for people to set up one-on-one meetings; it appropriately allows a little more schedule sharing than many-person meetings.
CEO Yori Neklin told me these changes reflect his belief that "TimeBridge solved scheduling, but meetings themselves are still screwed up." I'm not so sure scheduling is indeed solved, but I do agree that most meetings are awful. I believe the new features will help more meetings start on time, and might just make a tiny dent in the content of meetings themselves. But that's fine. Every little bit helps.
See also Tungle launches non-annoying scheduling service and Beyond freemium: The Timebridge business model works.
The meeting time negotiation service TimeBridge is adding a new Web-based component today. It now lets you set up a page, which TimeBridge hosts, that displays your free times. People who want a piece of your schedule can request an available time from those that are open. It's a good improvement to TimeBridge for service providers like consultants.
Previously, all of TimeBridge's scheduling communications were in e-mails. See review: TimeBridge makes scheduling easy.
Now anyone can see what a slacker you are.
As before, TimeBridge gets its free/busy data from your Outlook or Google calendar; if you're a user of one of these products, you don't need to adopt a new basic scheduling system to use the TimeBridge meeting negotiation service.
It doesn't look like the new hosted schedule is embeddable in Web pages or on social network sites as a widget, though. If I was a consultant using TimeBridge to let my customers book time with me, I would prefer it if they didn't have to leave my site to do so.
I've used TimeBridge on and off since November 2006, and I've found that the plug-in for Outlook has a conflict with the McAfee virus scanner that CNET installs on our machines. But the service is so potentially valuable to me that I've tried three different versions of the software hoping it'd be fixed.
Previously, TimeBridge added a free conference calling service, a nice and natural add-on to a meeting coordination product.
See also: Timedriver, Jiffle (formerly iPolipo; review), ScheduleOnce (review), and Ether (review).
Adobe Creative Suite users will soon have to turn to other Web-based or local stock photography services to get their stock photo fix.
Adobe on Monday quietly announced the end of its stock photography service. The Stock Photos service has been a part of the popular Creative Suite since the introduction of Adobe Bridge in version 2. The cutoff date is March 31st, giving users a little less than two more months to use the service to acquire legal shots to use in design work.
According to Adobe's FAQ on the matter, the company is getting out of the stock photography business to "concentrate its efforts in other areas." The service acted as a go-between to other stock photography services without a markup. It's easily comparable to iTunes for stock photography, as it offered users a one-stop shop with live previews that could easily be put into Adobe's various design applications right after purchase.
Since the front end for the photo service is part of the Creative Suite software, Adobe's created a special uninstaller that gets rid of it in Bridge. Current users of Bridge are greeted to the below message, telling them how many days are left before the service cutoff, along with links to Adobe's customer service center.
To curb any latecomers, Adobe is also cutting off the search function of the stock photo tab on March 4, which will keep new users from even being able to get to the photos that are for sale.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
In the past several years, the rise of Web services that offer stock photography has been speedy. With Bridge, it appeared that Adobe was taking notice and making it easier to parse through them.
However, between this and Adobe's foray into publishing to other stock services, killing off the intermediary (Stock Photos on Bridge) to save some hours to work on future products makes good business sense.
This morning, the NewTeeVee Live conference had a heavy emphasis on monetizing video: that is, advertising. I talked to two companies here that have different takes on producing revenue from downloaded video, as opposed to streaming video, like you get on YouTube.
The challenge with downloads is that if the viewer of the file is offline when he or she views it, or if the file is watched on a player that doesn't phone home, there's no easy way to get statistics or analytics on how an traffic for ad (or content) is doing. That's not a problem with streaming content, where every bit that flashes in front of an eyeball can be tracked from the server.
I chatted first with Brian Steel, CEO of PodBridge. PodBridge inserts advertising in files when they are either downloaded or viewed. For content that ends up on disconnected devices, like iPods, PodBridge can even track when it's played.
PodBridge achieves this magic through a small resident application that users download and install. When I bristled at the need to install software to view content, Steel told me, "It's the bargain. If you want the content, you download the app." When you download, you're asked for some overview demographics, to which ads are targeted.
PodBridge will tell you things about your video downloads that you wouldn't know otherwise.
The big benefit--for advertisers--is that the download tracks what's played on the PC, and gives advertisers rich analytics on media consumption that would otherwise not be available.
The downside is the download. Although it's lightweight, installing software will put off some users (like me), and it limits the platforms that the media can be downloaded to. Fortunately, PodBridge can also be configured to work without the PC-resident software, in which case it will track download data only, not information on what's actually played.
KipTronic competes with PodBridge. It stitches an advertisement into a media file when it is downloaded, on the server. The advantage to this is that the file that the viewer gets is just ordinary media, and can be played just as easily on the viewer's devices. The downside is that once the file is downloaded, KipTronic can't tell the advertiser what's happened to it--if it's ever played, for example, or for how long.
KipTronic is also different because it's purely an ad insertion and analytics play; the company does not sell ads. PodBridge, by contrast, is also its own network, although customers can bring their own advertisers if they wish.
Both companies are addressing an important issue, but I don't think either has the downloadable ad business dialed in yet. KipTronic leaves too much data behind, but PodBridge locks content behind software.
I wrote favorably about the idea of TimeBridge last year. It's a service that's supposed to make scheduling meetings less of pain in the neck, by letting an organizer send out several proposed times for a meeting, and then coordinating the replies of attendees until everyone agrees on a single time, at which point it will lock in the agreed-on time for everyone and release the tentative hold it had on the alternate spots.
TimeBridge e-mails options to the people you want to meet with.
The service is now in public beta (finally), and I've been using it to schedule meetings. The upshot: It works great.
What I like best about TimeBridge is its integration with Outlook. There's a very handy "Reply with TimeBridge" option that it adds to Outlook if you install the add-on. If someone sends you an e-mail about a meeting, you can use this option to transfer the discussion over to the TimeBridge system. Your recipient will get a link to a Web page, where it's easy to select one of the meeting times you propose. Or, if you instead start a conversation about a new meeting, TimeBridge reads your recently-used Outlook e-mail recipients to make entering in the recipient very easy. In ether case, TimeBridge syncs with your Outlook calendar and shows you the times you have available, which makes picking possible meetings slots easy.
You can grant a limited view of your calendar to people you meet with frequently.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Like the party planner MyPunchBowl (review), respondents can pick more than one time that works, and flag one as "best." The product also syncs with Google Calendar.
If there are people you meet with frequently, you can share your general availability with them, allowing them to propose meeting times when you're available. The system only shows when you have appointments booked, not with whom or where they are.
My small beefs with TimeBridge are these: First, from within Outlook it pops up Internet Explorer screens for its functions, even if your default browser is set to Firefox. Second, it doesn't let you assign more than one tentative meeting spot to a time block during the negotiation phase. This keeps things simple, but there are some meetings for which users might feel a musical chairs approach to scheduling would work. I'd like the option, at least.
TimeBridge will always be a free version, CEO Yori Nelken told me. Premium versions will be available with more features. Competitive service iPolipo (review), in contrast, has only a 30-day free trial, and it requires you to give up either a PayPal authorization or a credit card number to access it. That's cracked. Try TimeBridge.
From the Web 2.0 Conference:
Most of us waste a lot of time trying to find times for meetings. Inside a company, Microsoft Outlook users (on Exchange servers) can see the times their coworkers are free and busy. It's a good start, but when we want to schedule a meeting with multiple people or meet with people outside our company, everything can quickly fall apart. TimeBridge is trying to solve this problem, with a system that handles the negotiation of finding meeting times.
(Credit:
TimeBridge)
Like the ultrasimple Doodle, TimeBridge lets you set up multiple options for a meeting, and it lets attendees select the times that work best for them. But TimeBridge also lets you do more complex setup. For example, if you have two meetings to set up with several people in each and four slots that could potentially work for you, TimeBridge will send out, on your behalf, the available times that make sense, and it will update available times for everybody as people respond (via a Web form). It also integrates into Outlook and automatically promotes meeting times from "tentative" to "confirmed" as people sign up. Like Plaxo, which updates contact books, a lot of the negotiation happens behind the scenes if the parties on both ends use the product.
One of the really cool things about TimeBridge is that you can offer the same tentative meeting slots to different people and different meetings, and TimeBridge will keep everybody up to date and broker the times to make sure you don't double-book.
The service also lets meeting organizers set up a shared work space for meetings: a place where attendees can store notes and talk about the meeting agenda. I think that's a superfluous feature (that's what e-mail is good for), but the rest of the technology is just what we need. I can't wait to try it out.
There will be a free version, and the company is also considering paid and enterprise programs. The bad news: It's in private beta now and won't be generally available until 2007.
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