Syncing calendars and scheduling meetings over email can be an arduous and annoying task. I’ve often wished that I could just send my calendar to contacts instead of going back and forth over email, so we could find a mutual time that works best for various schedules more quickly. Tungle, a scheduling and calendar sharing tool we wrote about during its launch last year, has made scheduling a meeting a whole lot more social and simple through its Tungle.Me technology.
Tungle offers users Tungle Accelerate, a free web-based application that lets you share calendars across companies and platforms, schedule meetings with individuals or groups inside or outside their company and propose multiple meeting times in invitations. The service currently syncs with Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Entourage for Mac, and soon Lotus Notes.
Tungle’s latest technology, Tungle.Me, a “click to meet” application that is integrated with Tungle Accelerate, makes inbound scheduling more social. Once you create a Tungle account, you can also create a Tungle.me URL (you can include this link in an email or message and anyone can click on it) which you can send to contacts. At that site, contacts will input their name and email to verify their identity, then choose an available time to meet with you. Your calendar (which is synced via Tungle) will appear so that contacts can choose an open time. The spots where you have meetings are blocked off. Once a contact requests a meeting, you are sent an email with potential times for meetings. You can accept the meeting time (your calendar will be updated upon approval), send the contact another meeting time or you can deny the meeting all together. If you add meetings into your calendar that are synced with Tungle, your Tungle.me link is updated in real-time. And contacts who request a meeting don’t have to be Tungle users to use the Tungle.me interface.
Your Tungle.me link can also be embedded as a widget in an email or on a site as well as added as a Facebook widget on your profile. The widgets display a real-time glance of a users’ availability and a quick link to their personal Tungle.me URL.
The widget is a great idea, but I’m not so sure I’d want to give Facebook users and all of my friends the ability schedule a meeting with me. There is also the potential for random people, who you don’t know, to spam your email with meeting requests. Of course, you can always deny these meetings but it’s still annoying to sort though random emails in the first place.
But the service itself is a innovative idea and could save users, especially those who have frequent daily and weekly meetings but don’t have a personal assistant or secretary, a lot of time when it comes to scheduling those meetings. And the ability for your Tungle calendar to be synced with Outlook, Google Calendar and other popular scheduling applications makes the service compelling. Tungle’s main competitors are TimeBridge, which also lets you publish your calendar to selected users, and Jiffle.
I’ve been using Tungle to schedule meeting for a while now and I can’t imagine having to go back and forth on emails again. Good work, guys.
Nice to see another great startup from Montreal here
I love this post. I think this is going to change the way meetings are planned and booked. I am going to check this out as it it sounds very easy.
Has anyone noticed that for every good TC post there are about 5 boring ones?
Remind me about this comment the next time someone says we write about twitter too much and not enough about new apps.
I agree: I ignore most of them on twitter
I always wondered when something like this would be available. Just makes sense to me.
I tried Tungle a year ago, they’ve really come a long way! Have to say that the UI is awesome!
@markcooperuk for me more than 20, it’s because we are so different
wow color looks like TringAll (http://www.TringAll.com) rymes similar…
This whole ‘turning everything into a verb’ thing is really annoying me.
The developers of Tungle.Me may find the following open source scheduling software API from Prague Technical University in the Czech, called TORSCHE Scheduling Toolbox for Matlab. TORSCHE is written in Matlab and the scheduling algorithms are developed using techniques from Operations Research (OR), which is the appropriate way of doing scheduling (ie, via OR). TORSCHE is so advanced where it can be used in complex task as industrial machine scheduling for instance. Their papers on the TORSCHE algorithms are also available freely from their site.
Let me know by posting back here if you’re keen to look at the possibility of porting TORSCHE into whatever language that you developed your application in, because it can easily be done in Java or perhaps C#. I can point you out to the appropriate Java API or C# API to use.
I haven’t used TORSCHE before, but I looked at it closely last year for the possibility of porting it into Java for a project that I got involved in where scheduling algorithms were needed to be developed.
I’ve used Timebridge before and liked it. Tungle.me though, I’m not so keen on the name. Perhaps the service is good but I feel awkward about the thought of sending a “tungle” anything to a client. Sure you could say that about “Google” or any number of companies. Still, Tungle just doesn’t sound professional, no matter how catchy of a web name you think it is or not.
Like the name or not, I have been using Tungle for about 4 months now, and I can tell you that it simply works. The Tungle guys keep on improving their service.
I have used Timebridge, and was not impressed by their UI – clunky and buggy.
I’m looking forward to trying out Tungle.me
Very cool! Thanks for writing about this. This seems so simple. I like that others don’t have to sign-up to the service to schedule a meeting with me. I hope it lives up to my expectations.
But I’m not so sure how this is social though. Most of the time, you do not need to schedule a meeting to catch a lunch or a beer with friends. I think calendars and rigid schedules are for business, but not for everyday sociability. The latter is more spontaneous.
I heard that Tungle is going into bankruptcy, and is completely insolvent.
Having just raised USD $5M last September I can assure you Tungle is very far from being bankrupt or insolvent. You may have been confusing them with someone else in the space.
No, I’m 100% positive it is the Canadian company Tungle from Montreal that is close to bankruptcy. The news is that the 5M was in high yield debt well above prime, and that they are having difficultly making payments on the debt.
Hey Smartinvestor,
As the CFO of Tungle I can assure you the $5M was not debt of any kind and that the company is very far away from bankruptcy.
@Smart-but-ill-informed-Investor I had the privilege of having front row seats to Tungle’s $5M Series A last fall (right around the time where the World ended). So no worries of bankruptcy or insolvency for a long while. Tungle me sometimes if you’d like to discuss ! Cheers, David
Very cool. I’ve been waiting for something link this.
Cuts down the 6 step:
“OK, let’s get together and discuss”.
“Great. Let’s plan on it!”
So, add the “Where do you want to meet for lunch?” (location/food type) feature, and you will decrease internet traffic by approx 8.7%…
Ah, once more without escape characters…
Cuts down the 6 step:
“OK, let’s get together and discuss”.
[Game of chicken ensues to see who will throw out suggested time first]
[Offer, Counter-Offer]
[Repeat x4]
“Great. Let’s plan on it!”
[Game of chicken ensues to see who will send invite]
[Repeat entire process with meeting location]
So, add the “Where do you want to meet for lunch?” (location/food type) feature, and you will decrease internet traffic by approx 8.7%…
Personally, I much prefer the simpler services like duopoll.com as they don’t require registrations and a lot of clicking. Give it a spin.
-Dan