"This will be experimental at first...No one has figured out a great way to do this," Kapor said during an early panel called "Schedules and Calendars."
Microsoft's chief technical officer, Ray Ozzie, said he spends most of his day managing and juggling things. The home calendar, he said, is a "convenient place to communicate with my wife" and maintain a work schedule, which he prints out before the beginning of each day. "I jot notes down on that paper about meetings during the day," he said, having to write them down again later.
Microsoft, Bjordahl said in a later interview, has made a "significant investment" in its calendar program for the next release of Outlook, which is version 12 and is scheduled for late 2006. Since Outlook's first release in the late 1990s, its calendar component has largely been neglected in favor of improvements to e-mail, he said. But the coming version, which is available in beta release, will include a "cleaner, frictionless" user interface design and improved support for the industry de facto standard Internet Calendar Protocol, with bolstered sharing capabilities.
While major companies like Microsoft are making improvements, several upstarts are trying to capture the opportunity. Here's a look at some players.
- Renkoo. One of the hot names at the conference, the 9-month-old Silicon Valley company hasn't launched its product yet, but it showcased a Web site that CEO Adam Rifkin said it plans to launch early next year. Renkoo is a quasi-lightweight version of Evite, the event site, but rather than specialising in large groups or set events, the site will let people schedule and plan events with a small group of friends, e.g., a dinner out, an afternoon movie or a beer after work with friends. Visitors can create a small profile, query friends about a proposed gathering and negotiate the details with them over the Web, e-mail or a mobile phone via SMS (short message service). The company plans to make money by advertising.
- Zvents. California-based Zvents, which launched in October, is capitalising on the absence of a powerful event search engine on the Internet. (It even demonstrated its search engine to Google executives attending the conference.)
The upstart lets people search for thousands of events by location, time and theme. People can view the results in the form of a map, a list or a calendar; and then save events to a personal calendar or export it by RSS (really simple syndication). Then visitors can view the monthly or daily events of their social contacts, or by social filter. That way, a user could presumably meet up with a friend or family member easily. Finally, the site is designed to make it easy for people to embed a social or specific event calendar (like that of a baseball team) into a blog. The free service collects fees from event organisers or local advertisers.
- Trumba. A Seattle-based software upstart, Trumba showed off its event-publishing tools at the event, as well as trumpeting a partnership with newspaper company Knight Ridder. The company develops and sells tools to publishers like Knight Ridder and Tribune Company (a pilot tester), and those tools let the sites aggregate and display information on local events. Visitors can add new events, save and export events to a personal calendar, share a scheduled calendar with friends and e-mail events to friends.
Still, some attendees were uncertain of the market opportunity.
"I'm surprised that there's so many people here doing the same thing, but it makes me wonder whether it is such a pain-point as everyone says," said one attendee. "Outlook works pretty well for me, and families work well with paper (calendars)."
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