Calendars are getting lots of attention and innovation lately. After years of neglect entrepreneurs are now focusing on solving some of the gnarly synchronization and interop problems. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, IBM, and a bunch of venture backed start-ups are jumping into the game.
CNET News has a story today "Tech Executives: Time is of the essence" which covers the When 2.0 conference at Stanford yesterday. Ray Ozzie, Mitch Kapor, Raymie Stata, and Yori Nelkin were on a "Schedules and Calendars" panel. These guys are the wizards of calendars and collaboration. I worked for Ray at Groove Networks, worked with Raymie Stata at DEC's research labs, and am now helping Yori Nelkin with his new company, TimeBridge. Everyone knows Mitch Kapor from his Lotus days.
Ray Ozzie and the team at Microsoft recently announced SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions) for RSS. I wrote a story explaining SSE last month. Frustration with synchronizing and managing calendars that were work, personal, or shared was the catalyst behind Ray's innovation. SSE basically makes RSS bi-directional, and many-to-many, versus the current one way, one to many construct of RSS. SSE will open all sorts of possibilities not only in calendars, but in many dynamic object applications.
Microsoft's Hans Bjordahl said Microsoft has made a "significant investment" in its calendar program for the next release of Outlook, version 12, which is scheduled for late 2006. Expect more innovations in follow on releases.
Start-up companies innovating in the calendar space include; TimeBridge, Trumba, Zvents, Renkoo, and Kalookoo. Renkoo and Kalookoo are in stealth/start-up mode and don't have web sites yet.
Timebridge is focusing on better ways to schedule meetings with people outside your company. Setting up meetings inside your own company is relatively easy since you can access the free/busy time schedules of anyone you want to invite. But what happens when you try to schedule a meeting with a customer, supplier, or partner outside your corporate domain? Usually there are multiple emails back and forth suggesting available dates and times before finally agreeing on a date that works. Then what happens if you need to reschedule or add participants? These are the problems Timebridge is looking at.
Trumba is developing a web based calendar for managing, organizing, and sharing calendar events that could be public or shared. Trumba will import calendar entries from other calendars into the Trumba web based calendar, and works great for group calendars.
Zvents, Renkoo, and Kalookoo are all focused on managing and scheduling public events.
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. Once implemented it will radically change the way we manage calendars and other dynamic applications.
The time has come for innovation in calendars, meeting scheduling, and meeting management. You can mark your calendar for late 2006 for the innovations to start rolling out. Happy New Year!!
