Jason Clarke found a great new startup today called Scrybe. It hasn’t launched yet, but they’re using YouTube to showcase the product (see video below). More companies should do this – it gives the company a way to show everyone exactly what their product is all about and control the messaging during the crucial pre-launch stage.
Scrybe looks to be a unique online calendar application that works just fine when you’re offline, too. Just open the site in the browser as if you were online – the app will sync the next time you are online. The calendar view auto-expands and minimizes depending on what you are looking at. It also allows seemless cut and paste and integration with Office documents, as well as a way to bookmark and grab content from websites. They’ve even thought through proper printing of calendars, to-do lists and other content (this feature reminds me of possibly the least technically advanced startup we’ve covered).
The online/offline functionality is what I like best about this product. This is something we discussed around email applications a few weeks ago, and is part of the promise of Adobe’s upcoming Apollo platform.
This is definitely a startup to watch. Look for a launch this month.
Gonna make it tough for Timebridge on LaunchPad at Web 2.0 in two weeks.
The development looks to be Flex with some backend, maybe Java.
Another reflecty logo! Adding it to http://www.reflectylogo.com
I see you took out that lame 30box buddycard thing, thank goodness. What a horrible way for a worthless company to try to stay relevant.
Who’d think there was enough interest in yet another calendar/personal-management tool out there…. Come-on guys, as if the 95% of users cared about online, off-line… That feature is a plus when compared to other online planning tools… But compared to the rest of us using Word/Outlook – come on, let’s be realistic.
I don’t know about these videos. A lot of sites have been making videos that are absolutely useless and sometimes down right funny (not in a good way). At least this one shows off the product.
See my post for a couple sites that have videos that just make you say “What the F%$#?”.
http://www.soci...social-network/
This looks amazing, probably too amazing to be anything other than flash so I’m less in awe but for pure functionality this looks like one to watch.
The video does portray amazing features but how many of them will actually be available to free users is 1 question. Another is whether there is the need for another calendar app. I mean why would users switch to something new like scrybe if it showcases nice features but actually are a pain to work with. Nonetheless an app to try once it comes out.
Wonderful demo of COMPLEXITY.
Panels, panes, popup menus, different screens, scattered information. This is animation and interface overload. Your data is overwhelmed by the interface that never quits.
Makes a great demo but hey, that is what the tech world seems to be about. Great demos, bad products. Certainly I could be wrong, and I look forward to trying it, but I have been around and I have seen this before. My gut tells me great demo, bad product. Great in theory, bad in practice.
And PaperSync? It is called printing. Nice print formats, sure, but this is printing not syncing. So they are already starting with the broken promises. I guess they are right at home in the tech world. Fancy names for things that are not fancy. Continues to confuse the customer. Again, welcome to the tech world.
For the techies out there, it does appear this is build with Flex. That is how they do the offline storage. But it also means that you are locked to your own computer. This is not as flexible as they make it seem.
Ho hum, I just want my data available wherever I am. That syncing feature is nice, but it would be better if it was extended to all of my data and not just the calendar.
Oh man, sweet idea… When we’re all connected to a secured web-based hard drive, and every device is connected to the ‘net, you could use the calendar to program your coffee pot in the morning. Heh.
/two-thirds realism
/one-third sarcasm
I do not see this as anything special, glorified calendar is all I see. I quite like the Google calendar, and I do not see how this can make any headway.
Alex
Good grief, such a jaded set of comments.
Scrybe seems offer a nice set of integrated and useful tools, and quite visually appealing. I like the PaperSync concept, I think it is quite clever use of print.
> Scrybe Could Set a New Standard In Office Apps
Wha the heck does this mean? A ‘new standard’ for having the most Flash/Flex features ?
I agree with Brandon – Great demo but questionable as viable product.
These Scrybe guys spammed my blog a few days ago. I think that’s a pretty lousy tactic. What does my site have to do with web 2.0? The only mentions I’ve ever made of “web 2.0″ were about how much I think it sucks.
I don’t know how my blog even wound up on their list of spam targets.
I like the offline/online sync feature…hope that starts to span across all “office 2.0″ apps. Thanks for the lead on this Mike.
They should learn about Marketing 101.
Having a product branded ‘Scrybe’, and a primary domain of ‘iscrybe.com’, is a marketing nightmare.
But otherwise, this looks like a very promising product.
What seems to be missing, however, is the ability to classify events into various collapsible calendars, import/export them, colour-code your events, and so on. I’d say collaboration tools are missing too, but those seem to be coming up in the next feature video. I’d also like to see geotagging of events together with mapping support.
> sufiy
> October 21st, 2006 at 7:15 am
Excuse me?
This new cool calender could be very useful to people who trevel a lot and are allways connected to the web. I guess this type of service is for tech. lovers anyway.
Thank you for sharing this story with me !
I have to concur with Brandon’s comments here. I’d have to say that in an enterprise, this would be a no go.
I can drag n drop files into an email client calendar (offline) no sweat and it syncs with the collab server (email \ calendaring) as soon as its connected. So, for personal usage, this thing appears to be good demo, bad use case for the tech.
I personally thing a tabbed browser environment, using the ability to open multiple tabs at once as your start page, is the best focus for an offline \ online solution to email n calendaring. I envision seeing some day the ability to open up a tabbed browser, and it automatically grabs my device login (desktop, laptop, smartphone, what have you), and it opens multi tabs and authenticates into multi pages all at once. One tab would be my web based email \ chat \ calendar tool, the 2nd my portal home page, the 3rd my web based collab system.
Keep it all in the tabbed browser, none of this rich internet client stuff (make it easier for users to use and IT admins to manage). A win win for all.
I think this looks amazing – finally somebody is “rethinking” the calendar and how a person stays organized. It appears from the video that information is made much more accessible, and organized in a logical way. I’d say it’s very well thought through from a User Interface perspective. I’ve been looking for something like this for quite a long time.
It appears to be more than just a calendar on a web page – it’s rethinking how a person needs to stay organized and view information. What’s more, I appreciate a web app being well though-out before being put on the market. They’re right, the office is going mobile, and I’m definitely in that “mobile business user in a modern, mid-sized organization” demographic that would actually use this. Of course it would never fly in a fortune 500 company – they have difficulty keeping up with the times due to their sheer size and red tape as it is, but I don’t know if that’s really who they’re targeting.
As for features I’d say this NEEDS, is integration with an e-mail client, because after all, aren’t more than half our e-mails actually “ta-do’s” that need to be “ta-done”? I can save an e-mail in Outlook as a task, assign categories to it, or even flag them different colors and as a business owner, it really helps me to stay organized. Hopefully they carry that through.
Finally – please stop it Google fanatics… Google apps blow! I don’t want to hear about Google calendar – it sucks! What cracks me up about a “Google hugger” is, despite the mediocrity of Googles unfinished apps… (oh excuse me, we call it “beta” now), you love them. Their apps integrate/sync with nothing, they don’t let users “own” their information (sync it or move it elsewhere), and they just rely on the enthusiasm or sheer need of their bewildered users to fill the gaps of their unfinished work – so that they can later, like Microsoft, either recreate it and call it their own, or just buy a company out! Google is a fantastic search engine, that’s it.
Finally, something I can use…
Good stuff. The online / offline solves a big problem. Not sure if the other features he showed will really help much.
Online / offline is definately something I’ve been waiting for… I hope it gets applied to other apps and other companies.
An excellent application with well thought-out features. Though I wonder what the system requirements are to make it run as smoothly as the video shows. The paper sync is actually a really nice idea. A quick way for people without pocket PCs or similar to carry their online calendar with them.
very fine calendaring solution, with much potential imho. Makes me wonder that IBM or MS did never come up with such GUI-ideas. Compliment.
but, just calendaring on its own.. i dont know… anyway, did i say that its a very good GUI? Keep it up with that innovative work, expand the function-set upon To-Do lists, group calendaring, a neat and small E-Mail function and there you go
Google Calendar, LN oder Exchange based solutions? You dont want that, trust me, dont become lousy.
I hesitate to ‘gush’ about a product before it’s official debut but this is a great mousetrap! These guys have really thought things through in terms of optimizing performance of common user tasks. I love the fact the views resize/collapse automatically and the folded paper format to go will be very useful for people like myself who like to ‘travel light.’ I have owned a number of pdas/smartphones, and imo, theyre more trouble than they’re worth. Scrybe’s little app is a nice bridge between pen/paper and digital record-keeping.
As another post mentioned,Scrybe is a clever name but they really misjudged the iwannabe URL. Either way, theyre are sure to be a hit if the actual app works like it did in the demo. Great job Scrybe..way to kick Google and evil empire in the nuts.
btw, Sufiy are you on medication?
You can find the author’s comments on synchronization support on my blog.
I think this has a place beyond social individual calendaring. So far all I can see is the individual usage aspects with a promise of collaborative features to come.
If the collaborative capabilities follow in the same vein, then I can see a possible niche in the market for businesses and organisations who really do not want the cost of maintaining and managing an internal “virtual Office” type infrasturcture to get all the personal scheduling and group time scheduling capabilites
Having said that though, although the user interface looks nice, if it is only a mainly a calendaring and and note taking and organising capabilities then there is plenty of competition around
I like the work, it looks beautiful. However, I’m not sure on their overall business strategy – which is typical of so many tech companies.
I would expect a calendar app to be far more suited to business than to consumers? It seems to me like they are aiming at the “consumer” market because they have all that beta reg, youtube vid, etc PR crud. Then the contents of their vids suggest that too with iPod shopping, football clippings.
Anyway, if they are going for the consumer market then I don’t like their chances. They are much better off flogging that thing as a white labelled product. Remember Kiko? That calendar app that sold to Tucows on eBay for $200+(?), all those companies that bid up to that price that weren’t successful are probably still after a decent calendar app.
There’s more to business than flogging hoola hoops and skateboards.
Explain “context” to an end user
web 1.0
err i am an end user, and i understand ‘context’ when used to explain how scrybe’s supposed to work.
personally i did gush at the concept, and i’m eager to try it as well though, and then after trying maybe perhaps give my official thumbs up or thumbs down.
i guess the ‘tech guys’ who know more than me have a different perspective this early though.
interesting experimental interface…
but will this be implemented as a flash/html mixture, an apollo based client? then it will be probably dead on arrival. flash seems to be only acceptable in a applet frame by now, like a video player. for whole user interfaces, menues etc, it’s just too web1.0…
sure, calendars are time based, but not in a mediated way. the problem with time tables is that someone has to really invent a new interface for them… to not yet recreate yet another Kiko. as with the RSS story there needs to be more ical feeds available to schedule consumer oriented events, recordings of old media feeds. the whole personal calendaring needs to take in consideration that not everyone likes to expand a manager attitute to all aspects of private life..
what’s really missing is a calendar app synched with mobile phones, and a speech based / touch tone interface. (like an answering machine).
until then, probably paper calendars are there to stay. like for notes and scribbles, and napkin business plans. no matter how many touchpads and pda you want to sell to us…
Still, I have no idea on what Scrybe really is. All I see is the YouTube video.
Looks like a glorified Laszlo app. Perhaps they’ve got “portable” modules now?
Looks promising…but did anyone else laugh at the part about “Sync” and then he launched into a demo of how to print out your calendar to paper? Paper?!? “Now you can carry your data with you.” Oh give me a break. I carry a phone/PDA. That’s how I carry my data with me. Sync to that, or don’t waste my time with a cool interface.
I like the online/offline functions, but when I’m standing at a doctor’s office and the secretary asks, “How about Wednesday the 4th for your next appointment?” what am I going to say…”Oh, I forgot to print out my paper calendar this morning…do you have a web browser I can borrow?”
And then you’re out and about in your day and you have your wonderful paper calendar that you wrote all over. What am I going to do, sit down at the computer and scrybe it all in? I don’t think so.
I use Outlook because I can have my stuff in one place and then it syncs out to wherever I need it without my having to think about it. It syncs to Salesforce.com so my colleagues can see where I am for work-related items. It syncs to Airset so my husband and I can coordinate our schedules for family-related items. It syncs to my phone so I have my schedule on the go. Until one of these online calendars is close to doing that, I’m not budging from Outlook.
Seriously folks, those of you being utterly dismissive are missing out on some good ideas here.
The focus sensitive interface, fantastic timezone support and easy transfer in from other apps appears to be well thought out and very well implemented. And a convenient paper print out can sometimes be JUST THE RIGHT THING. Not everybody wants to walk around with 10 lbs of electronics all day every day. There are even circumstances when you can only have pen and paper e.g. recent flights from London to the US.
This is the FIRST time I’ve seen a calendaring app that might persuade me to finally ditch Outlook.
And until Google starts to understand that the UI is actually pretty important for the 99.99999% of the world that is not super tech savvy, this type of product will always grab my attention.
isnt the zoomy UI stuff nearly identical to some of the openlaszlo calendar demos?
http://www.open...r%20in%20Legals
the benefit of having a local app is performance, as much as local data. Even when I’m online, gcal is sluggish (maybe cos im not in the US). I use iCal on the mac for that reason; even though its not the best mac app its still more usable than gcal.
openlaszlo’s nice calendar demo may take quite a few mins to load, not much use if you take your laptop overseas.
GMail was the same for me: in china, the ajax loading of lots of background content made it easier to just use hotmail. Or maybe that was cos MS disclose all the email at source so the chinese let it through easier…
This is a very nice Web 2.0 ajax’e application, but does the market really need another one?
The whole, ‘If you build it they will come’ attitude is a farce. Look at the map space, MapQuest still ownes 56%. And I don’t know about you guys, but i can’t remember the last time I’ve been off-line.
Maybe I can buy the code and 10K users in 6 months on ebay for 100 grand.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the application and would consider using it, but I doubt I would pay for it.
What would be really cool if Google and Live (hotmail) released an mail API like yahoo’s and they intergrated webmail properly into the calendar.
Rob Ellis
–
but will this be implemented as a flash/html mixture, an apollo based client? then it will be probably dead on arrival. flash seems to be only acceptable in a applet frame by now, like a video player. for whole user interfaces, menues etc, it’s just too web1.0…
–
Apollo is not a browser plugin, but rather a cross-os runtime, that allows RIA / web applications to be built and deployed to the desktop using Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax, and other web technologies.
For example, an Apollo appliction could consist of the following combinations:
Flash / Flex only
Flash with HTML
HTML / JavaScript only
HTML / JavaScript with Flash
any of the above combinations can also leverage PDF.
More info here:
http://www.adobe.com/go/apollo
Keep an eye on that link, as it should be update this week with some new info.
Hope that helps…
mike chambers
mesh@adobe.com
- The online/offline accessibility should be an essential capability for all web apps in the future. You never want to let your ISP or the service server forbid you from accessing your schedule. Even though the network failure became less and less frequent, in many cases it just makes it worse when you desparately need your schedule and simply couldn’t connect to the web. “Bad luck never comes alone”. Don’t risk on that, especially business users;
- No matter how good the product is, how elegant the interactions and “context preservations” are, if they couldn’t bundle it to a suite, users won’t bother to go to that stand alone application, just for the (may-be) better user experience, especially when they have one-login-for-all accounts like google docs, windows live office, etc.
- From the successes of MySpace and YouTube, we see that a lot of considerations on UX and GUI are not as important as we thought they should. Maybe it’s not a good comparison between SNS and this web app, but that’ just a thought.
Anyhow, the product is really impressive and well designed to me, (based on the demo). I’m quite interested in how they achived those smooth grid resizings. I always have problems with the smoothnesses of js animations.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned the annoying Indian accent???
Jerald – annoying Indian accent? It makes a nice change to NOT hear an American or British accent for once, and he spoke slowly and clearly… I don’t see what the problem is?
Jerald: what do you have against indians ? if you do a WHOIS on the domain name, you’ll notice that the guy that owns the domain is indian
–
I hope that the beta gonna be launched in time because it sounds like a very exciting system !
Jerald
It is time for you to take a look at your own life. Life is too short to be based on predjuices. Without Indians we will not have modern day computer science –
Outstanding video. We need more American artists like that.
Ok. Disregard the last comment. That is what you get for having too many tabs open at once. What I MEANT to say was, this product looks great, and I can’t wait to try it out.
Great demo, probably an excellent product. Cant wait for it to come out. That printing option is great, keeping in mind that not everyone owns a PDA.
I agree with Brian: Companies like Google and Microsoft have hollow hegemonies over the tech market. Startups like Scrybe, however innovative, often get trampled and lost in the Web2.0 crowd.
The offline/online synchronizing feature offered by Scrybe maybe a trail-blazing innovation. I would love to see many other companies following their lead. For now, I am waiting for my beta account invitation.
Way to go, Scrybe!
Great and innovative application!, they have great ideas and programming skills too!, but, will it survive the 2.0 bubble without being a part of a giant?
Finally, someone other than Apple thinks about the world away from the keyboard!! I love the paper tasklist, I have been trying to figure out how to work at and away from multiple computers and in my car.
Fabulous job!
People: People do need to get away from computers and those that can design for that are going to win.