Briefing with Tungle, April 17

Just finished up a call with Marc Gingras, the CEO of free/busy aggregator new entrant Tungle (see my March 27 Daily Report for earlier coverage). Tungle isn't a new calendaring client per se, but rather a way of sharing free/busy information within groups and definitely across organizational boundaries.

Marc shared a couple of additional data points on Tungle and their view of the market:

• Cross-Organizational Calendaring ... Setting up meetings with people outside of your organization is a big challenge. In a research study they did for internal purposes, they found that 60% of meetings are scheduled with people outside of the office. With email today, it really is a shot in the dark (ie, "are you available at ... 10am on ... Tuesday???")


• More Calendar Support Coming ... The beta version works with Outlook 2003, but by the end of May 2007 Tungle will support all versions of Outlook, with Google Calendar coming in June/July.


• Mac Version Coming ... A Mac version of the Tungle client will be available in Fall (September-November 2007). Cool.


• Diversity in Practice ... The diversity of calendaring practice between people makes it very difficult to develop an appropriate solution. Some people track tentative meetings; others don't. Some people note personal appointments; others don't. Some people use Outlook; many don't. Finding the appropriate common denominator is a challenge, which is why Tungle has decided to focus on sharing free/busy.


• Tungle Client = Permissions ... The Tungle client is really a permissions client or a control panel for free/busy sharing, rather than a calendaring client. It provides functions for specifying who you will share you calendar entries or free/busy time with, but meeting invites and all of that negotiation are actually done in your calendaring client of choice, eg, Outlook or other. The Tungle client can display free/busy time from a list of selected people, but when you go to invite them to a meeting, it's the Outlook calendar invite form that you fill out, not a Tungle one. In addition, once calendar sharing is set up, you can use Outlook as you do today, set up a meeting, invite people to it, and Outlook will read their free/busy time from the Tungle client ... thus making Tungle essentially invisible in the moment-by-moment meeting negotiations. I like the theory of what they've done.


• Peer-to-Peer ... The peer-to-peer design of Tungle ensures privacy and security over your calendaring data. Because Tungle isn't client-server, your meeting events aren't stored on a central server anywhere.

I'm looking forward to receiving my invite to the beta program. I will have to use my PC for that, however, which I'm sure will make a certain person grin.

Comments

[John Head]

Did they give you any idea about the Notes plugin that they say is being worked on? I have not been able to get them to narrow anything down and its kinda fustrating

[Michael Sampson]

Hi John, I don't know. I'll ask. M.

[Marc Gingras]

Hi John, for the time being, we have not yet slotted the integration with Notes on our roadmap. This is certainly something we can do, but are looking for feedback from our current and future users to help set our priorities.

[John Head]

Marc - Thanks for the comment. But due to the info, time for me to delete your product and stop telling anyone about it. If you are not going to support Notes, then your missing a huge segment of the market and I would never be able to use your product with my customers. Thanks for the info.

[Peter Mojica]

This is a great product innovation, there has been free/busy standards for sometime, but no one has leveraged these into a real commercial application to solve a real business problem thats simple to use. I personally find myself spending a large amount of time coordinating meetings with people in different companies on an almost daily basis, mostly business partners who I meet with frequently. It takes in most instances 10 or more emails exchanges across 5-10 people to nail down a meeting time/date. It we all were Tungle users the meeting coordinator could see everyones availability even through we are in 4 or 5 different companies and just schedule a meeting the same way I do with people in my own company. The productivity savings is enormous. I'm amazed at the pricing model? Free. I'm not sure what the market would bear, but if I can get back 3 hours per week * 10 people * 48 wks? Hmm. Well I take it back, free sounds good!