On the Web, it's all about eyeballs, and so newsgroup aggregator Deja Newswill add Web calendaring to its community site some time this week, the company confirmed Monday.
Deja News has licensed eCal's Internet calendaring engine for its community site, which could go live as early as Tuesday. Deja News is trying to expand its digest of Usenet message boards into a broader online business. Calendaring, which brings standard appointment managing to individual Web users, is a hot button for many Web companies, which think it will bring users to their sites every day in order to check their calendars. Still, it has yet to establish itself as such a "sticky" Web tool.
Nonetheless, adding online calendaring is "a huge enhancement for Deja communities," said Lisa Lahde, a spokeswoman for Deja News in New York. Lahde said the company thinks calendaring will draw a wider variety of users to its site, and will encourage current users to stay on its site longer. She confirmed that Deja News will pay a licensing fee to eCal, but declined to give specifics.
For eCal, a two-year-old company based in Philadelphia, the deal may help it stand out from a crowded field of competitors, all of whom are trying to land similar deals. The company says it's different from rivals, in that it licenses a calendaring engine, which can then be customized by sites such as Deja News or bolt.com, which also is a licensee.
One analyst says the Deja News deal won't be enough to guarantee eCal a spot on investor's calendars, though it's a good start.
"Deja News is a name, though I'm not sure people will go there" for calendaring, said Lucas Graves, an analyst at Jupiter Communications in New York. Graves noted that eCal's plan to make money by licensing a back-end was somewhat different from its competitors, and could pay off for the company.
"Since (eCal's) willing to work on a variety of different revenue schemes, it could be attractive option for portals that don't want to invent the technology themselves," Graves said.
Who is eCal?
Graves noted that he thought eCal's offering was "cool."
"It integrates the portability of the Web with the other value you can drive from being on the Web, which is that you can pull in ... reams of information," Graves said. For instance, fans of a rock group might pull a concert schedule into their calendar, or a baseball fan could pull in information on games.
eCal president Rick Rasansky naturally sees e-calendaring as a potential sticky application for sites, but he also thinks it could yield lucrative e-commerce opportunities. He suggested that sites with eCal licenses, for instance, could pitch specific products related to items users have selected as interesting to them.
Rasansky acknowledged that privacy issues would come into play in the calendaring environment, and said that eCal was working to gain TRUSTe certification.
For now, eCal, formerly known as Appoint.net, is focused on adding features and building partners. The company uses live data feeds from a variety of sources to get information such as band tour dates and sporting events.
Besides licensing revenues, it aims to engage in revenue sharing from ads seen by calendar users, and ultimately in e-commerce revenues.
His intended market is anyone who uses a calendar and has e-mail, and the company will soon be able to synchronize with Microsoft's Outlook mail package.
