Meeting coordination service Timebridge now has serious competition from Tungle, a Montreal-based service that opens up into public beta today.
When I met with Tungle CEO Marc Gringas this past January, he outlined the type of technology that would address the major pain points of scheduling meetings: it would reduce the number of transactions needed to pick a time, it would be simple to use across time zones, it would be an open system for anyone to use, and people would be able to see each others’ schedules with it.
Tungle does a good job fulfilling most of these principles. It comes as an Outlook plugin that automatically loads all of your contacts and calendar events (either from Outlook itself or other calendar apps like Google Calendar). You can choose to share your schedule with others who also have the plugin installed, and you can invite others to a meeting whether or not they even use Outlook.
The invitation system is key. Tungle users can invite non-Tungle users by sending them a link to a special coordination page. This “Tungle Space” page shows your availability and solicits their input for when they are also available. If your schedule changes after sending out the invitation, the Tungle Space page will update itself accordingly. And you can use it to invite multiple people to the same meeting. As people visit the page and indicate when they are available, the options get narrowed down until the last invitee to respond chooses a time.
There are many similarities between Tungle and TimeBridge (see our review of the latter here) but Gringas stresses that TimeBridge has more of a “wish list” approach to it, where organizers suggest a set of times and these get either accepted or rejected by invitees. But while Tungle may be more about finding the overlapping free time in participants’ schedules, it lacks the freedom of TimeBridge, which can be used entirely through the browser.
When it comes down to it, this type of product will mostly appeal to a certain class of professionals that needs to schedule group meetings all the time. Many of us only schedule one-on-one meetings that take at most a few emails to pin down, and we won’t be bothered to change our habits. But I imagine there are many assistants and managers out there who will find this very helpful and worth the effort of picking it up.
Tungle raised $1.5M CAD from JLA Ventures and Des Jardins Venture Capital in May 2007. Jiffle is another competitor we covered just last week.
Now if they could include iCal users, THAT would be outstanding. Then finally the Mac and PC folks could all see each others calendars in one place. What a world that would be…
It’s Desjardins Venture Capital not Des Jardins Venture Capital
http://www.dcrd...jardins.com/en/
This seems like a great idea. I used to use outlook for meeting collaboration but it was difficult dealing with all the various user groups in my organization. There were thousands of employees, and trying to add them all to a list so I could see them all at the same time was a huge hassle.
I hope these guys do well.
Glad to see this go live. I have been using Tungle in private beta for weeks now and love it. I use it to schedule group meetings (like board) and use it even more to schedule one on one meetings. The process is simple and everyone I schedule with loves it. I use it inside our company since we don’t have Exchange and use it for all my external meetings.
Saw one of their demos, and it looked like a very promising product. Also, if I can remember right… they wanted to do a Mac client but it wasn’t a priority…
It looks promising. In fairness, I haven’t tried it, but something more web-based would be my preference. If it worked with Outlook and Google Calendar and other systems (the iCal comment hit it on the head) that would be exciting
Won’t work.
I used to work with a group scheduling software company. The biggest problem is common time availability and ONLY a real-time solution that lets you see common times works. Tungle waits while people’s schedules dynamically change.
No one is going to make billions on this one. In fact, I don’t see a lot of revenue models for this turkey.
it is either for geeks or sales people or PR. I can’t find who else would need it.
I used to use outlook for meeting collaboration but it was difficult dealing with all the various user groups in my organization. There were thousands of employees, and trying to add them all to a list so I could see them all at the same time was a huge hassle.
This has to be a joke. “Doctor, it hurts when I do this…”
http://www.scheduleonce.com is a simple alternative to Tungle. You use it for the real complex meetings and you dont need to register or download anything
Our firm has been using Presdo (http://www.presdo.com) for a while now (we use Google for our Calendar) to solve the same problem. We’re a development firm with lots of clients, so you can add that as another type of user.
Also, re: #7 Gilbert, I wouldn’t bet on a single real-time system making it’s way to market – hence the energy in this space. I think Presdo and, from what I can see, Jiffle, are taking an interesting and non-obvious approach to solving the problem asynchronously via email.
thanks bob, I really like scheduleonce – its perfect!
I really like this about techcrunch community, often someone will post a better alternative in the comments!
re: #11 and #7 “I wouldn’t bet on a single real-time system making it’s way to market”
I might be wrong but the Tungle “Space” actually seems to be real-time updated, at least for the ones that have installed the client, via p2p.
RE: 13
Dave,
You’re right. We dynamically update your schedule so when an attendee looks at your schedule inside Tungle they’re seeing it “live”.
Mark
Another one, if you also need something to help you organize activities with your friends, not only a professional environment, check http://www.mixin.com. mixin is a place to share, discuss and decide activities, it’s a social microscheduler. Think of twitter but future oriented!