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Despite the availability of efficient online scheduling tools, professionals burn up nearly five hours per week scheduling meetings, according to a study commissioned by Doodle, a company that makes one of those Web-based tools.

By the time the year ends, many have spent the cumulative equivalent of six weeks scheduling meetings, and that doesn't include time spent attending them.

As the week began, all eyes in the tech world were on the Techcrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco, from which some of the biggest tech news of the week came.

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Web-based scheduling app Tungle announced today its integration with the Web meeting platform WebEx in a move certain to delight small business users who already utilize these products.

The partnership seems like a natural one, as Cisco-owned WebEx is one of the most popular tools for conducting online meetings and conference calls, and Tungle is an emerging platform for scheduling such meetings.

Users of Doodle, the scheduling app and Launchpad finalist, can now integrate Google Calendar, Lotus Notes, Outlook, or any calendar with an ICS feed using the new "Calendar View" feature. It's a useful enhancement that helps the SaaS compete with similar services.

Restaurant review site UrbanSpoon is slowly moving into OpenTable's territory. About half a year ago, the company launched a very limited test of a basic reservations tracking system for restaurants in the Seattle area. At that time, however, restaurant owners could only use UrbanSpoon to tell their customers whether they had last-minute openings. Now, however, UrbanSpoon is launching RezBook, an iPad app and online reservations platform that will allow restaurants to bypass OpenTable and manage their tables and reservation books.

Making breakfast, lunch or dinner plans for any group that involves more than two people can quickly become a chore. Lunchwalla, which launched earlier today, wants to make this task a bit easier by providing you with a web service that allows you to avoid long email chains and back-and-forth phone calls. You simply pick a time, choose a few restaurant options and a list of friends you want to invite. Lunchwalla will email your contacts and they can then RSVP and vote for the restaurant they prefer.

Meetings suck. But if there's one thing worse than meetings, it's playing email tag to schedule them. Is your company still sending out mass emails to ask for preferred meeting times? It's the pits, isn't it? Yes, Outlook has a hack whereby you can solicit responses for scheduling, but it's not much of an improvement. There's a better way, and it's a ridiculously simple concept. A Web app lets you pick a range of dates on a calendar and then notify your colleagues so they can pick the times and dates that work for them. You then view the responses and you're done.

An open source development team in Portland, Oregon has released OpenConferenceWare, a sophisticated free package for processing event session proposals and displaying event schedules. Igal Koshevoy and Reid Beels built the system and put it on display as the scheduling system for the forthcoming Open Source Bridge conference, Portland's response to losing the popular O'Reilly event OSCON to San Jose, California.

Events planners would be well served to check out the software; it's not just free and extensible, it's also quite full-featured right out of the box.

Setster is a new service, still in beta, that allows businesses to let their clients or customers book appointments with them directly through an online calendar widget. Setster supports working with multiple employee calendars (which they call providers) on the same login, as well as a catalog of services a client can choose from and a couple of different widget styles.

TimeBridge is a San Francisco-based startup focused on making it easy to schedule meetings and appointments. In a relatively crowded market, the product has managed to show impressive growth over recent months, this week surpassing the 200,000 user mark, with over 12,000 businesses using the service.