PALO ALTO — Taking a meeting has never been so complicated.
At least that’s the sense you get listening to the array of software
designers and industry thinkers discuss the challenges of time management
and calendaring in today’s increasingly mobile society.
“A meeting is really a transaction,” said Yori Nelkin of Timebridge. “You
may be free, but you only want to meet if others are there, or if the
meeting is at a certain time, and if there will be certain materials there
[or if other criteria are met].”
These were some of the issues speakers wrestled with at industry analyst
Esther Dyson’s first When 2.0 conference, held on Tuesday at Stanford University.
Corporate calendars are nothing new, but speakers at When 2.0 talked about
expanding the accessibility and relevancy of electronic calendars to
consumers as well as to corporate users. One speaker noted, for example, that
users rarely use corporate calendaring tools to schedule or coordinate their
personal events.
“There are some 300 million users of [Microsoft] Outlook, but it’s an
enterprise focus; there’s zero of everyone else,” said Mitch Kapor,
president of the Open Source Applications Foundation. OSAF is developing
Chandler, a personal information manager. In the 1980s, Kapor designed Lotus
1-2-3, considered the first killer application to drive sales of the IBM PC.
Some think calendaring could be the next killer app. “You are five times
more likely to attend an event if it’s on your calendar,” Dennis Trumba,
vice president of marketing at Trumba, told internetnews.com.
OSAF has scaled back its original goal of bringing out multiple applications in one package in order to focus on calendaring. “We’ve learned
that if you have enormous vision, it’s impossible to do in one release,” said
Kapor. “We’re calendar-focused, because we think it’s a killer feature to be
able to easily share calendars.”
Host Dyson agreed. “The innovation in calendaring is on the consumer
side; the enterprise side is relatively static.”
While some speakers derided Microsoft Outlook, Ray Ozzie, the software
giant’s CTO, said it continues to make progress. He said
the forthcoming Office
12 has “a very significant transformation of the UI and usability. There
are no menus, which is an interesting, bold risk.” Office 12 isn’t due
until after Microsoft’s Vista OS ships later in 2006.
It may well take a bold risk to get more people to use electronic
calendaring for their planning. A show of hands among even the sophisticated
entrepreneurs and software gurus at When 2.0 showed most still rely on paper
for business time-management tasks. And Dyson, who writes frequently about
bleeding-edge software advances, admitted she uses Microsoft Word to keep her
calendar of appointments.
In a small demo area, several companies showed pre-release versions of
calendar and scheduling programs, as well as updates to shipping products.
Zimbra is, like Chandler, an open source project, but the Web client and
server software developer is focused on corporate applications. The company said it’s
targeting Fortune 1000 companies, particularly in financial services, retail
and manufacturing, as well as higher education.
With support for Outlook
included, the browser-based client includes search, shared calendar, and mail
that is integrated with contacts and calendar. It’s also cross-platform,
supporting Windows, Apple and Linux systems. In the e-mail client, which
accepts RSS feeds, a mini-calendar view is anchored to the app for a quick
view of scheduled appointments.
Rather than manage events already planned, Renkoo focuses on making
events happen. “We bring friends together in the process,” CEO Adam
Rifkin told internetnews.com.
He said services like Evite are for
larger group functions that already have a fixed time and place. With Renkoo
there is, among other features, a real-time voting mechanism, so
people can decide on a time for lunch, movie or other gathering. The
original planner can decide when to rein in the votes and chatter in order to set
the details of where and when. Renkoo also accepts SMS text messaging, and
it’s experimenting with links to instant messaging services as part of the
site.
While many of the vendors were optimistic that they could break new ground on
the consumer side, at least one attendee was skeptical.
“These things are great if you’re an extrovert,” said Chris Nesladek, a
user interface designer for Intuit . “But you’re only
organized if you have responsibility. For a lot of 18- to 24-year-olds,
having a calendar or updating your schedule doesn’t matter.
For young and old alike, Dyson had this comment worth considering in a
recent edition of her Release 1.0 newsletter: “You can’t create time. You
can only steal it, reallocate it, use it or waste it.”
