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.

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TimeBridge, the service that allows users to collaboratively determine when to schedule their meetings, has released a WAP mobile version of its site alongside a plugin adding iCal support. The iCal plugin is currently in private beta, and the first 500 TechCrunch readers to go here will be able to partipate (enter the password “techcrunch”).

TimeBridge, which we reviewed last August, tries to take the hassle out of arranging meetings by eliminating the long email threads that often result whenever more than a few people try to schedule something. The site employs a voting system, allowing users to select a number of times they’d be able to make, and the system chooses the most agreeable slot. Besides iCal, TimeBridge also supports integration with Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar.

In conjunction with the new releases, TimeBridge has also announced that it has hit the 100,000 user milestone. While this represents only a tiny fraction of the site’s possible market, it is still an impressive gain in a space where many companies are set in their tried-and-true habits. There are a number of other players in this space, including Jiffle, which we covered in April, and Tungle (reviewed here).

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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.

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They originally started out as a deeply integrated Outlook plug-in launched at the end of last year. While initially distinguishing them from other scheduling competitors, I have a feeling that the plug-in requirement added unnecessary friction to using the system.

Now TimeBridge is back with a full web only interface that integrates with your Google and Outlook calendars, with support for other calendars soon. The new version pushes them in the direction of their Montreal-based competitor Tungle, which integrates with more calendars. Tungle also differs by using a P2P system that runs between you and your contacts systems, not on a central server like TimeBrigde.

TimeBridge’s original Outlook plug-in brought their full functionality to your desktop. All of this functionality is now available with the web application, using the plug-ins to pull and push calendaring data between your computer and the web. Updates made on one calendar are reflected on the others and a master calendar is accessible anywhere on the web.

To make a meeting, you log in to their site, and fill out an email-like form consisting of the email addresses for attendees, meeting topic, and possible meeting times. You don’t have to download anything to use TimeBridge, but it helps if you install the plug-ins. If your attendees don’t have a TimeBridge, you can just suggest times based on your personal schedule. If they have TimeBridge integrated with their calendars, though, you can view what blocks of their scheduled time in a sidebar as you choose times.

After you send out the meeting request, each participant gets a full meeting request form in their email. The form lists the possible meeting times, which participants can select as no good, good, or best. Accepting the meeting request places time placeholders on calendars for people with TimeBridge.

The system then picks the best meeting time by points based on attendee responses with ties going to earlier times. If a an upcoming meeting time hasn’t been settled, you can either pick a meeting time or send reminders to the people that didn’t respond. Attendees with TimeBridge will then see the confirmed meeting slot pop up on their calendars.

The video below outlines the process in greater detail. TimeBridge is a funded through a total of $8.5 million by Mayfield and Norwest Ventures.

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The highlight of last year’s conference for me was LaunchPad, where thirteen young startups showed their stuff to the audience. See our coverage from last year here and here. Many of those companies are doing very well. Only one, Pubsub, has entered the TechCrunch DeadPool.

LaunchPad this year was perhaps even more competitive than last year. Over 200 companies applied to present at the conference. Only thirteen were accepted, and each had five minutes to demo their product to the crowd. We have a summary of what each announced below.

3B

3B creates a three dimensional browsing environment based on input from a user, who can then create an avatar to explore the space, invite friends, chat with them, etc. A demo is here. In my notes I wrote “pretty, fun, completely useless.” On further reflection I can see people creating a 3B for various promotional purposes, but it won’t be able to compete with Second Life for virtual reality attention.

Adify

Adify allows anyone to create a vertical ad network – their software handles all of the details and allows publishers to determine prices, ad types, and monitor advertising metrics. They aim to help an estimated 500,000 advertisers fullfill their desire for targeted advertising on the sites they want. The Washington Post uses Adify with their Blogroll platform.

Instructables

Instructables is a site catering to “do-it-yourself’ers” and includes lots of step by step instructions for creating things. 30,000 people use the site regularly, the company says. Today they announced the launch of new collaboration features. More on them in the near future.

InTheChair

IntheChair is best described as turning musical instrument practice into a video game. It’s a web application that lets musicians practice their instrument alongside recordings of professional musicians. By hooking up a microphone to your computer, the application gives you real-time feedback about how well you’re hitting the notes and tempo of any song in their library. Users can also record sessions and share them with their teacher, grandmother, etc.

oDesk

See our previous coverage of oDesk here. oDesk provides an online marketplace for finding talented programming contractors. They launched in May 2006.

OmniDrive

We’ve covered Omnidrive for nearly a year…they announced their launch today at the conference. They have an online, windows, and mac client that allow you to seamlessly store and sync files from your computer to your online drive. Their open API also allows for more specialized implementations. See our previous coverage.

Sphere

We’ve covered Sphere, an blog search engine, for almost a year. Today they launched Sphere It for blogs. TechCrunch has integrated Sphere It into our template and a link is included at the end of every post. Click it to see contextually related blog posts and other information relevant to the story.

Stikkit

Stikkit, the “digital equivalent of a sticky note,” launched today – see TechCrunch UK for deeper coverage. Use it to take quick notes, and Stikkit makes an intelligent decision as to exactly what you are writing about and takes action from there. Mention a name and contact information and it will store it in an address book. Event information is stored in a calendar. Stikkit also supports tagging and other taxonomy structures. We’ll be following up on Stikkit.

Venyo

Venyo is launching a reputation management application with a couple of interesting twists. Not many details yet.

TimeBridge

Timebridge integrates with Outlook 2003 and helps businesses bundle together easy meeting coordination and project collaboration. Meetings are coordinated by sending out email invitations with suggested meeting times that match up with everyone’s schedule. Attendees choose their best times, and Timebridge finds the best time for the group. They’ve taken $6 million in funding from Mayfield Fund and Norwest Venture Partners.

Turn

Turn is a new advertising network that work on a CPA, or cost-per-action, basis, meaning advertisers only pay if some defined action occurs, like a sale or user registration. Turn computes how often an action actually occurs, takes into account the bidded payment per action, and distributes ads across its network accordingly. Looks like there’s a lot of technology behind this, and the executive team is strong.

Klostu

Klostu launched today. It leverages the 300 million people who have participated in Boardscape message boards and allows them to create a single sign on and identity among all of the boards. Turns each message board into a social network. We’re going to dig deeper on this one. Great design.

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