Finally, Sync Any Calendar to Any Calendar
Keeping up with multiple calendars can be hard. Many people have one for work, with details on important meetings, phone calls, and to-do's, and another for the family, with the kids' activities, personal errands, and family whereabouts. Online calendars have made it easier to access all your different calendars on the web from anywhere you have an internet connection, but frequent travelers and business users still needed an offline version, like enterprise-friendly Microsoft Outlook. And while software like Outlook now includes a feature that allows you to subscribe to internet calendars, you may not be utilizing that option since your personal calendar contains some items you wouldn't wanted synced to your work computer.
But finally, a new service from FuseCal can help with this problem. FuseCal lets you sync any calendar to any calendar, while also providing filters that let you limit the types of events that are included in the sync.
FuseCal, a product of Public Display, a start-up technology company located in Providence, RI, is currently in alpha mode. The service works with many different types of calendars, both offline and online, including Outlook 2003/2007, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Windows Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar, and more.
How It Works
To use the service, you just enter in a URL of any web calendar, and FuseCal will display it so that you can pick and choose which appointments you want to sync. The calendar doesn't have to be public - even a private Google Calendar URL will work.
Beneath the preview of the calendar, two events panes are displayed: "Events I Don't Want" and "Events I Want." Using the "Filter" box, you can narrow down the list by keyword or you can pick and choose events to sync manually, using the arrows.
Filtering Events in FuseCal
When you're finished filtering the calendar, you click on the "Save Events To My Calendar" button and choose the personal calendar you want to sync with. You can also choose to automatically add any new events from this feed to your calendar, not add new events, or add future events containing a particular keyword or phrase.
Setting up Syncing
FuseCal For Web Publishers
For publishers, FuseCal can also be used on your web site. For example, you may have an online calendar of your organization's events for the year which your web site visitors would be interested in syncing to their own calendar. By using the option in FuseCal for publishers, you can put an embed code on your site that allows your visitors to take your web calendar and convert it into an iCal format they can subscribe to. Each event keeps a link back to the original source URL, so your visitors can refer back to your web site at any time.
Publishers can also keep track of their calendar's usage via real-time analytics, showing subscribers, hits, times, locations and more. FuseCal even promises that publisher's calendars are human-reviewed for accuracy.
Unlike other services, like SyncMyCal, there's nothing to download and you don't have to limit yourself to only a few types of calendars. The FuseCal site also has an intuitive UI making it easy-to-use, even for those who aren't tech-savvy. I did have some occasional problems with the site's responsiveness, but that will probably be resolved as they grow. For what they are trying to accomplish, FuseCal does a great job, especially considering they have only just launched into alpha. This is definitely a startup to watch this year.
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I've been using FuseCal for a little bit now and it's great. Love to see more tech companies from Providence getting attention here!
This looks really promising. This might help with my current .Mac syncing dilemma.
FuseCal and the Public Display team rock.
I chimed in here:
http://rinexus.com/blog/2008/03/hacker-news-positively-critiques-fusecal
but what about sync to mobile devices - win mobile, android or symbian?
Thanks for the review, Sarah!
I'd just like to add that we don't really see ourselves as a direct competitor to SyncMyCal.
FuseCal's core feature is our proprietary information extraction technology, that understands the calendar events in (ideally) any website. To my knowledge, there's no one else doing quite that.
Anyways, we're pumped that so may people are finding FuseCal useful. The best thing you all can do to help us out is give us feedback! Things we're doing well, things we need to do better... let us know! There's a feedback form on fusecal.com, or you can leave your thoughts in the comments here... We're listening!
Many thanks to everyone who's taken FuseCal for a spin!
cheers,
Matt Gillooly
Product Manager, FuseCal.com
This is fantastic, can't wait to give it a try. At least it's all coming together.
I'm still looking for that perfect solution that syncs my google calendar (my primary calendar) to both my iCal and sony ericsson mobile. At the moment I'm syncing to my mobile with goosync.com and then syncing that to my mac with iSync.
I guess in a perfect world it would also sync to my work machines outlook 2003.
Hi,
about 50% of the enterprises out there use Lotus Notes I can't see where it says Fusecal syncs with Lotus Notes.
So, I'm sorry but your title is factualy incorrect, it does not sync any calendar to any calendar.
If you prove me wrong with an ability to sync lotus notes, I'd be over the moon, 'cos I've been looking for about 3 years for a decent solution.
Is it just me and my zany computer, or is FuseCal mainly intended for feeding public calendars to private ones? I can't seem to get FuseCal to read from my private Google calendar address.