Calendaring, Scheduling Meetings: Timebridge CEO Interview Reveals Strategic Importance of This Space

Written by Bernard Lunn / October 27, 2009 5:00 PM / 11 Comments

We have looked at Calendaring many times (such as in our round-up of 10 players). In our own work, we have started working with both Tungle and Doodle. To understand more about why this market is strategically interesting, we recently spoke with Yori Nelken, CEO of Timebridge (see our previous coverage here).

Missing in Action: Native Mobile Interface

What has held up adoption, in our opinion, is the lack of native mobile interfaces. This is a problem in other markets as well (as we cover here in relation to Basecamp). In the real world, many of the people who matter are out and about, meeting people face to face. Perhaps developers, who spend most of their day coding at a desk, miss the nuances of this use case. Many developers point out that there are too many mobile devices with different standards.

These sound like bad excuses. You could cover the lion's share of the market with native interfaces for iPhone, Android and Blackberry; the rest can follow later. As a developer, you need to test for usability on all three. Solicit beta users who are fans of each type. Don't rely on the one device that you use and that your fellow coders happen to love.

Timebridge caught our attention for using SMS intelligently, allowing us to ping a reminder just before a meeting. This is a smart use of the lowest common denominator that all mobile devices support.

The sync between Blackberry (my device) and calendars for Outlook, Google (my calendar) and iCal works just fine at a technical level, at least one way. One problem is that these calendars get "polluted" easily with a lot of team calendars. Google Calendar does not feel like my calendar. Third-party apps can access Google Calendar very easily. Google has done a great job there, but it makes the calendar so crowded that it becomes useless.

That is easily fixed by changing some settings. But even then, I never consult my schedule. I rely on the calendar in my BlackBerry, which is always with me, even when I am far from any desktop or Internet access.

The sync has to be two-way, then. When I change something in my BlackBerry calendar, it should reflect in my Google calendar, so that any scheduling app that accesses my Google calendar will see the updated real calendar. This does not appear to be available yet.

But my colleagues use iPhone and Android phones, and I have no idea what the people who I schedule external meetings with use. To earn serious adoption, a scheduling and calendaring system has to offer: (1) an effective lowest-common-denominator way to interface (SMS and/or email), and (2) a native interface for leading smartphones.

Two Modes: Sharing and Polling

People generally schedule two types of meetings. Gross simplification alert!

Sharing, when one individual, who is much in demand, sets the schedule.
Our very own Marshall Kirkpatrick uses Tungle in this way. A lot of startups want to speak with him. If he wants to talk to them back, he simply says, "Here is my calendar, figure out what works for you." Yori created Timebridge when he was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Mayfield Fund, and he has interviewed a lot of the assistants who schedule meetings for VCs (another species that many people want to get on their calendar). Yes, when you have 2% of funds under management, you can afford to have an assistant schedule your meetings! For less wealthy "influentials," the sharing mode of a calendaring service is ideal.
Poll, when many peers need to negotiate a time.
Perhaps you are starting a new project and need input from several people. You control the scheduling but cannot simply say, "This is when we'll all meet." Herding cats is hard. I have used Doodle for this purpose, and it is effective (though like all of these services, it's missing native Blackberry support).

Timebridge claims to offer both modes. For company use, this is essential because both use cases are common.

Don't Just Schedule: Launch the Meeting

What really impressed me when I first saw Timebridge was that it automatically launched a screen-sharing service. This is a great way for the meeting controller to show presentations and demos or just the agenda and objectives. (It was interesting to learn that this was a re-skinned version of DimDim, a company we have covered before and put in our 2008 Best Of Enterprise list.)

Timebridge can also automatically connect to FreeConference.com, a service we use all the time.

So, if you are at a desktop, you would join using screen-sharing. If not, you would use the telephone bridge.

This is an important next step. It is not just about "When can we meet?" but also about the subsequent question, "Where and how do we meet."

Missing in action? Skype. It would be neat if the calendaring system would either automatically launch an existing Skype chat room or create one for all of the participants.

Make Meetings More Productive? Really?

Here is the nightmare scenario: third-party calendaring becomes so ubiquitous and effective that we spend a lot more time in unproductive meetings.

Timebridge has set for itself the noble mission of making meetings more productive. Its tagline is "Make meetings great!"

I remain skeptical. That is an art, a management art. It all depends on who is driving the meeting. Yori agrees but says that by instilling best practices, the average will improve. He may be right. The basics are well known. For each meeting you need:

One objective,
An agenda,
Agreed actions.

But this moves us into new territory. This is the world of project management systems. In a heterogenous world, each participant may be using a different system. There is no point in having "objectives" and "actions" in Timebridge if participants monitor and manage that sort of thing in Basecamp or (getting back to the mobile issue) on their BlackBerry or iPhone.

One area where Yori convinced me that simple changes could mean a lot was in starting meetings on time. The time suck of waiting 15 minutes for Mr. Dilly and Ms. Dally to show up on a call causes a lot of teeth-grinding. Sending SMS reminders helps, but how else to change late arrival habits is unclear.

Why Microsoft Exchange Is Threatened by Third-Party Calendaring

In ye olden days, a company standardized on either Lotus Notes (IBM) or Microsoft Exchange. Notes is still very much around, despite its venerable age, but Yori told us that it rarely shows up. Most users are on Outlook and Exchange, with an increasing number on Gmail and Google Calendar.

With everyone on the same calendar system, scheduling meetings is easy. Why stick with Outlook and Exchange when Gmail is cheaper and more Web-native? The reason for many of the folks in enterprise IT who make these decisions is that calendaring is easy if everyone uses the same system.

Third-party calendaring vendors such as Timebridge, Doodle and Tungle live in a heterogeneous world where you do not know what calendar anyone is using. Increasingly, it comes down to three: Outlook, Google and iCal. Yes, these are from the big three: Microsoft, Google and Apple.

Calendaring is a side issue for Apple. But it is critical in the bruising battle between Microsoft and Google for dominance of the office market.

With Outlook email unlinked from calendaring, Google is in better shape to win over big accounts to Gmail. (And once on Gmail, other apps tend to follow.)

Comments

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Hi Bernard,

This is a very thoughtful and deep dive into an area that is heating up. To complement your article, I thought it would be interesting to share my thoughts on our industry.

Going back many centuries, calendars were invented to help people track time. Farmers could predict seasons to help plan their crops. Through the years, the ability to track one’s personal time helped evolve the ‘technology” to Franklin planners and other forms of paper notebooks.

Eventually, electronic calendars appeared, and with the appearance networking infrastructure, people started to share their calendars. This changed the utility of the calendar. Now, calendars were not just built to track one’s personal time, but also, this information was starting to be used to help schedule meetings.

There was, and still is a fundamental problem with this – the calendar is not the best paradigm to help people meet – as it was initially designed to help track time. It is not to say that there is no connection between tracking your time and the ability to schedule meetings, but the needs and required design are fundamentally different.

Let’s simply look at this example: Every morning, I get up and go to the gym (at least, I like to think that I do). Although this is a recurring event in my daily routine, it is not in my calendar – because I do not need to be reminded about it, i.e. I don’t need to track it. Our research has shown that many people have open timeslots in their calendars, but they are not free. They are working on that important report, they have set aside some time to walk the floor and talk with other team members – all important activities that never make it in a calendar.

That’s where scheduling services play a role. Companies like Tungle spend all their energy to help people connect and meet. We are not a calendaring solution, as we don’t help you track your time. We help you meet.

This is by no means an easy task. Everyone behaves differently, everyone tracks their time differently on different applications and devices, and everyone has different priorities.

You mentioned that mobile devices are an important element to getting people to meet. I could not agree more. This device is always with the person, always connected and keeps track of very valuable information. That's why scheduling services need to work with these devices to help people meet. Case in point, a few weeks ago, we launched the Tungle iPhone app, the first service that helps professionals meet while on the go. It is only logical that other devices will soon be supported.

At Tungle – our focus will remain on helping people connect and meet. We believe that we have just started to scratch the surface of solving this problem, and we have another 600 million business professionals to convert to our service ;)

Keep on Tunglin’

Marc Gingras
CEO & Founder of Tungle
www.tungle.com

Posted by: Marc Gingras | October 27, 2009 6:58 PM

I'm really excited by all the progress in this space, and to see Timebridge really pushing this agenda.

While I too am skeptical that any software product can in and of it self make meetings more productive, its exciting to see some of the walls around corporate calendaring systems starting to fall down. Its pretty crazy how generally closed calendaring products in the corporate world continue to be, even when there are pretty well developed standards at this point for publishing calendars and exchanging invite information.

In the corporate world, this is a real problem, and one I believe has a technology solution. In the personal world, I completely agree with Marc's comments that calendars aren't the answer -- people don't keep up to date calendars, and just because you are free doesn't mean you are available to meet. I'm curious to see how Tungle / Doodle evolve, and if there is a place for these kinds of products. Good news is that Google / Microsoft I don't think really get this problem outside of the workplace, so there is room to innovate.

Carl Sjogreen
Founding PM of Google Calendar

Posted by: Carl | October 27, 2009 10:57 PM

Thanks for this post, it really helps me a lot in managing my schedules as well as my meetings or so much of stuffs.. Thanks Bernard for sharing such an interesting post, i really appreciate this..

Posted by: nano | October 28, 2009 4:21 AM

Online collaborating and teaching can work, If you have trust and the right tools.
I recently tried http://www.showdocument.com - good app for uploading documents and working on them in real-time.
Most file types are supported and it needs no installation. - andy

Posted by: andy stewart | October 28, 2009 4:39 AM

Thanks for this post, it really helps me a lot in managing my schedules as well as my meetings or so much of stuffs.. Thanks Bernard for sharing such an interesting post, i really appreciate this..

Posted by: nano | October 28, 2009 4:48 AM

Carl - I agree with your comment that we can build services/tools to solve this problem. We are already seeing how simple services help people meet. I would add two comments:

1. Our research shows that the majority of business professionals use one calendar to track both their work and personal time. So the ability to draw a line between personal and professional life is quite hard.

2. I think that the leading calendars (Google, Microsoft, and Notes) have realized that calendars and email clients are more than just an application, they're a platform - where the information should be accessible by third party services to allow for innovation in different areas, including scheduling. Case in point, Microsoft's recent announcement about opening up Outlook, something that Google has been doing for quite some time.

Marc Gingras
CEO & Founder of Tungle
www.tungle.com

Posted by: Marc Gingras | October 28, 2009 5:07 AM

At Dimdim we're calendar agnostic. Track your time with whatever tool works best for you. We simply want to make the process of meeting live a one-click, no-install affair: all you need is your Dimdim room URL and a web browser.

To ensure we truly democratize this space and help everyone save time, money and travel we made Dimdim free.

Meet freely.

Steve Chazin
Dimdim

Posted by: Steve Chazin | October 28, 2009 5:19 AM

Since Doodle is mentioned, I'd like to add our view to the discussion: We at Doodle believe that scheduling should be as easy and simple as possible. Everybody and anybody should be able to take part in the scheduling process, whether they use an online or offline calendar or even a plain paper-based planner (or none at all...).

This is why we offer a transparent, flexible scheduling process and do not require users to download software or to even register to use the service. And it's why we introduced a generic mobile user interface more than a year ago to support a majority of devices. We also offer calendar integration but we try to base the integration on standard interfaces as often as possible so users are not forced to install sync software.

Doodle is heavily used by private and business users and our research indicates that these requirements are important for both groups.

Posted by: Myke Naef | October 28, 2009 5:55 AM

Bernard - thank you for the thoughtful write-up! What you wrote and the quality of the follow up comments are all a testimony to the emergence of a real category here.
Not to diminish the value of technology per-se, I can only second your insight that at the end of the day the ultimate solution has to rely on solid best practices & supporting tools - rather than just a technology or a platform.

Yori Nelken, TimeBridge

Posted by: Yori Nelken | October 28, 2009 5:05 PM

Hi Bernand,

Thanks for the article. It does provide a great perspective on the emerging scheduling and collaboration market.
We at Neatcall could not agree more with your sentence “It would be neat if the calendaring system would either automatically launch an existing Skype chat room or create one for all of the participants”. This is what our vision is all about, letting you coordinating and conducting the communication mode YOU prefer.
Mobile is the king in that sense and this is why Neatcall is focus on the mobile phone as the main tool for initiating communication from day zero.

More to come soon…

Dan Benger
Neatcall Founder & CEO
www.neatcall.com

Posted by: Dan Benger | November 2, 2009 12:46 AM

I use TimeBridge for a while and it fully supports daylight saving changes for meetings in the same timezone and for meetings between different timezones.Everyoneshould give it a try!

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