Company: Trumba
Launched: June 10, 2005
Funding: $4.75 million in July, 2004 – Funded by August Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Link
What is it?
“The word Trumba is actually an old Sardinian word for the kind of horn the town crier would blow when announcing the day’s news to villagers.”
Trumba is an online calendar. Think Outlook but where multiple people/groups can author and view the calendar. Share it with some people, or publish it to the web. Yes, it’s Outlook on steroids.
Trumba brings together Visio co-founders Jeremy Jaech and Ted Johnson with Visio CTO Peter Mullen.
The user interface is well thought out, easy sailing. Having Kleiner and August behind you helps you hire the best of the best, so I’m not surprised at its ease of use.
The signup process was one page, with a standard email confirmation required. Adding a new calendar item was a snap, and the level of detail you choose to include is up to you. Overall, it is a pleasure to use.
You can also create multiple calendars (think work, friends, family), and have different colors for each to keep track of them.
The product is not free, however. A sixty day free trial is included. After that, the price is $39.95/year.
In their own words, “Trumba OneCalendar is a new type of calendar service — a connected calendar. Trumba OneCalendar brings all of your schedules together — work, family, community and fun — into one easy-to-use calendar that keeps you connected to the people and groups you care about through events you share.”
One thing to note about open source competition: Dan Gillmor says “My current hopes are on the Chandler project at the Open Source Applications Foundation. (Disclosure: The project’s funder, Mitch Kapor, is also one of my seed investors.) Chandler still isn’t ready for prime time, either, but there are definite signs that it will be a huge help for people like me.”
Key Features:
- web based, no downloads
- Create unlimited calendars
- Publish group calendars as web pages
- Share a calendar privately
- Email upcoming events to a distribution list
- Synchronize with Microsoft Office Outlook
- Access your calendar from any Internet-connected computer
- works with nternet Explorer 5.5 or later, Mozilla 1.4 or later, Netscape® 7.1 or later, Firefox 1.0 or later, and Safari 1.2 or later
Screen Shots:
Management:
Jeremy Jaech, President and CEO
Ted Johnson, Vice President Products
Peter Mullen, Chief Software Architect
Dennis Tevlin, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
Clyde McQueen, Director of Software Engineering and Web Operations,
Link
Relevant Links:
What’s New at Trumba
FAQ
Press
Jeff Nolan on Trumba
PlanetTroy on Trumba
SiliconBeat on Trumba
Boyosphers on Group Calendars
Mike Lanberg on Trumba
Martin Tobias Trounces Trumba – “Trumba says they will have a calendar sync thingy for Outlook, but it is not ready – I say why launch without it?”
Tags: trumba, calendar, outlook, techcrunch, web2.0
Somewhere there has to be a better balance between free (altho nothing wrong with that at all!) and Trumba where each person you share your calendar with has to pay $39. That fee for the initiator of the calendar is fine – however keep it free for people who you share with until they want to set up calendars of their own.
On others – kiko I found buggy on sending invites – put in an email address and got a “lost internet connection” message and Goowy I signed up for and then when I input username/password to log in for the first time and clicked on the submit button – nothing happened. UPDATE – just tried now and it is loading – slowly.
keith
For Win users, what about Yahoo Calendar? Free, works great and syncs great, as far as I can tell, with Outlook.
Why buy Trumba, when I can get a better product like Airset for free. They let me sync my Palm now, and will be able to sync on my Verizon phone soon. When you google around and do the research, everyone seems to prefer airset. More features and free!
I switched from Trumba to Airset for the reasons above.
Responding to Keith’s comment–you can now share your Trumba calendar with other users who don’t have paid Trumba accounts. They just need to sign up for the free account.
After a quick review, seems that Trumba has increased their price to $99.95 a month… After previous pricing of $10 a month.
What’s up with that?