The thing about useful stuff is

Zipiko - meeting friends made easy Monday, November 10, 2008

Zipiko is a new approach to arranging meet-ups with friends that I can imagine catching on, which is showcasing at Le Web.

In concept it is very similar to Upcoming.org or even Meetup in that it is orientated around the notion of publishing events which your friends can see. The service is free [no ads spotted either] and is entirely web-hosted.

Members set up an event, detailing time and place plus comments. Thereafter friends can either be specifically invited or the event made public amongst your friends who can choose to participate in the open invite. Hence you can see events that your friends are organising and elect to opt in e.g. join your friends to watch the rugby in the pub.

I found that setting up an event was very easy and intutitive, via the simple online interface. Likewise, inviting friends was very easy. Interestingly the service currently send free SMS messages or emails to invite people, as well as notifying you of their responses.

To add friends to your account, you have the option of importing your phone contacts as well as importing contact from Gmail. Any friends you do add have to positively accept your invite to connect. I confess that didn't find either appealing since my address books co-mingle friends and business contacts. I think they should definitely be looking to add the capability to import contacts from services like Facebook, Twitter etc and you can buy code to do this off the shelf these days for less than $100.

The site claims it has been configured to be easy to use via mobile phone and a brief check on my own Blackberry phone browser did confirm this.

Connecting your events to your calendar is possible albeit only 30 Boxes appeared to be supported when I tried.

Whilst I understand that the team behind this are keen that you regularly use their site, I think the service would benefit from creating an ical feed of events from your "crowd" that could be accessible by calendar applications, with entries that link back to the Zipiko site. I say this because Gmail and Google calendar are two webapps I use constantly whereas I am initially less likely to have Zipiko open constantly. Likewise, it would be great if you could "send an calendar invite" to your own Zipiko account from say Google calendar to be added to the events list.

Worth trying when organising your next social meetup.

Labels: gmail, Google Calendar, meeting, meetup, social networks

posted by John Wilson @ 8:43 PM Permanent Link ,

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Google calendar synch isn't good enough Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Image via WikipediaAs a consequence of wanting to use several new services that only integrate with Google Calendar, I recently decided to cut-over to it as a trial. Sadly, whilst I've no issue with the Calendar itself, I've been having a bad time with the official Google synch program that links it with Outlook 2003.

Historically I've used Airset to maintain a calendar online, which I synch with a desktop running Outlook 2003, which in turn synchronises with my Blackberry.

The biggest issue for me is that the synch application doesn't allow you to parameterise the dates that you wish to synch. Hence, each time I synch it tries to compare thousands of very old entries which dramatically slows the whole synch down to a crawl lasting several hours. I did try to get round this by archiving my desktop calendar items in Outlook 2003. Unfortunately, an unknown "event" caused all of the calendar entry modified dates to be reset to a recent date, as a consequence of which unless I archive every historic calendar entry then they won't clear down.

It's inflexibility like this that is both its' strength and weakness. Yet it is sufficiently infuriating that I'm close to abandoning my efforts and reverting to Airset which worked very well, especially with its synchronisation service.

Separately, I would love to find an Imap equivalent for calendar entries on different devices to enable entries to remain in synch, but don't know of such a mechanism. Any suggestions / answers?

Labels: Airset, blackberry, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook

posted by John Wilson @ 2:55 PM Permanent Link ,

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Jifflenow - Another appointment scheduler Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Following on from my look at Presdo here, I also took at look at Jifflenow which was renamed from iPolipo and is not to be confused with the Jiffle [a Norfolk term apparently].

This service is much more in line with my aspirations for a scheduling service, albeit its' functionality is designed for one-to-one meetings rather than those involving many people.

Hence, you mark up your free/busy times and assign these as being available to selected contact groups that you create e.g. clients, vendors, consultants. You assign individuals to these groups and send them an email notification that you have given them access to your calendar and can select times to meet with you. Permission to view your can be time boxed with a start date and duration that they can have access.

Once a contact requests a meeting slot from your available times, it is immediately removed from the slots that others can see, thereby avoiding double booking problems. If you are happy to accept the appointment, Jifflenow both updates your actual Outlook or Google calendar and sends an email confirmation to the other party.

Your privacy is protected because contacts only see Available/Free timeslots, not scheduled meetings. However, entries in your Outlook or Google calendar made independently of Jifflenow do not update your available slots and so you will need to make manual updates.

A very neat feature is that the calendar view for your contacts includes automatic time zone translation, allowing them to see their local times once they have selected their timezone on the calendar screen.

Jiffle is free for up to 10 meeting confirmations per month, after which you either have to upgrade or stop using the service! Importantly contacts don't have to subscribe to Jifflenow or install any software to schedule meetings with you.

I do have four gripes about the offering

- To send one-off meeting ad-hoc invitees is overly complex and should be simplified. Presently you need to highlight times you wish to show as available and nominate which pre-defined groups you are wishing to share this calendar information with. Hence, it appears that to arrange a one-off meeting, you either need to direct the invitees to your public version of your calendar [assuming you've made one available], or create a one-time use group for the meeting.

- Invitees can't propose alternate times via the service e.g. the following week or different times. Whilst this may encourage you to put all your free times on show, some professionals may not like to show a calendar with lots of free time, as it looks bad e.g. similar impression to seeing an empty restaurant.

- I'm not sure how easy it will be to maintain the permission "windows" if you have a large number of clients, unless you simply give them all permanent access to the calendar rather than say a month ahead. It will be too easy to exclude certain people simply because you forgot to renew/extend their access period.

- The integration with Google calendar only extends to your main calendar. Hence if your Google calendar consolidates multiple calendar subscriptions in one view, these other entries will be missing within Jifflenow. It may not affect many people, but I am one of the few!

Other than that, I like the service and can see it being very valuable to a number of professionals who offer one-on-one consultations.

Labels: calendar, Google Calendar, Ipolipo, meeting, Microsoft Outlook, Presdo

posted by John Wilson @ 4:04 PM Permanent Link ,

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Presdo - a disappointing way to schedule appointments Monday, April 28, 2008

As someone who arranges countless meetings, I'm well aware of the disproportionate amount of time they can take to arrange. It's for this reason that I am always on the lookout for tools that make the process more efficient.

Timetomeet has been my favourite for sometime, albeit services from Timebridge and Whenisgood amongst others have much going for them. This week, I came across Presdo.

Whilst it's simple to use and has a stylish UI, I was disappointed with the service.

First the positives
- the ease of entering proposed times to meet is reminiscent of Google Calendar's quick entry and it successfully interprets different ways of entering dates/times.
- the invites to proposed attendees are quick to send and there is no requirement for invitees to sign-up for the service
- Presdo does offer integration into Google Calendar in the sense that it will put the appointment into your calendar

Drawbacks
- you can only propose one time to meet, which the invitees accept/reject or propose alternate arrangements. This is no better than email, other than the fact that it keeps track of acceptances and much worse when you consider that for a one-to-one meeting, you would typically offer a selection of times to the other person
- If there are multiple alternate suggestions from different invitees, the service doesn't help identify an optimum time
- the invites have to be sent from within the service and can't be sent from within your own email. This is understandable since the service sends a unique link to each invitee which is created "on the fly"

Overall, this one scores a "miss" for me.

Labels: Google Calendar, meeting, Timebridge, Timetomeet

posted by John Wilson @ 9:57 AM Permanent Link ,

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How to synchronise your calendar across devices Thursday, April 24, 2008

My calendar "infrastructure" is probably over-engineered as a consequence of being added to over time. Undoubtedly, recent offerings from Google could dramatically simplify it, which I will cover later on in this post.

Nonetheless, my system works as follows and has done so trouble-free for over 2 years.

1. Blackberry. My calendar on my blackberry is one of my entry points for appointments when I am out and about. This gets synchronised almost every night with an old version of Outlook on my old desktop at home.
2. Outlook synchronises with Airset, which acts as my online corporate and personal calendar, via a desktop application provided by Airset. Both are available at no charge.
3. Airset is my primary calendar when I am in the office, and all of my calendar entries are entered into Airset directly.

So this set-up provides a 3 way synch with Outlook. It also allows my wife to enter "family commitments" into the desktop at home, confident in the knowledge that it will be automatically included in my schedule. Similarly, she can check on my whereabouts when planning things.

In addition, I operate a 2 way synchronisation between Airset and Google Calendar. This serves three purposes.
- If Airset went offline for any reason, I can revert to Google Calendar, notwithstanding the other calendar instances I operate
- If I haven't synchronised my blackberry recently, I can check google calendar whilst on the move using my blackberry browser knowing that it will be up-to-date. Sadly Airset deem mobile access to be a premium chargeable service, but don't charge for the access to the calendar via ical and so this simply gets round their tariff [they detect you are trying to connect from a mobile device, which decent web services/sites should in order to render content appropriately, and so block access]
- Many more online services have been built to integrate with Google calendar than link to Airset.

This configuration has the disadvantage that the calendar versions can be out-of-synch for hours at a time, especially from the blackberry to the other calendar instances.

Calendar spaghetti or robust backup? Both is the honest answer. But if I were starting again, what would I do?
- Use Google calendar rather than Airset and synchronise it with Outlook using the free synchronisation application from Google
- Synchronise my blackberry with Google calendar using the free synchronisation application from Google

I would still need to link my blackberry to Outlook for my contacts information, because there is no similar facility via Google as yet................

The only thing holding me back from changing is that I prefer Airset's interface and features. But perhaps one day.

Of course, if you aren't a blackberry user but have internet access on your phone, then using Google calendar is even more compelling.

Labels: Airset, calendar, Google Calendar, outlook, synchronisation, Web application

posted by John Wilson @ 9:25 AM Permanent Link ,

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User heaven on a Blackberry

I confess to being a blackberry fan and have used one for about 5 years, finding it indispensable. For the last few years, I've also been free of the shackles of a large corporate IT department and hence able to determine what gets installed on my device [8820].

However, I've found relatively few applications worthy of installing other than
- the superb Google maps for mobile, which integrates well with the device's GPS capability, notwithstanding Google maps inherent capability to provide approximate location data via mobile phone cell information
- Gmail for blackberry which offers me a backup in case problems arise with the T-mobile blackberry email as well as to access old emails

Whilst I added Opera mini browser, I almost never have cause to use it, finding the native browser being adequate in most cases. This allows me access to all of my internet services when I'm on the move.

As for the Facebook blackberry application, it was installed and quickly uninstalled, matching my waning interest in that social network.

Lately, it has been great to see an increasing number of applications being developed for data synchronisation with the blackberry to the "cloud". The consequences of losing the device and related data has always been a concern to me.

For instance, Google recently released a free blackberry calendar synch application, allowing your device calendar to be directly synchronised with Google calendar. I'm not using it because I'm happy with my alternate configuration that I described here. Obviously, many corporate users will have real-time synch of their calendar over the air with their Exchange server, but very handy for SMEs.

Yesterday, I read about a blackberry synchronisation application for Remember the Milk, which is a task manager that also integrates with Gmail via a Firefox extension. Sadly this is a paid for application.

I was also excited to come across TellMe's offering. A Microsoft subsidiary, and only operating in the USA at present, its' blackberry application provides a voice interface to a location based search service e.g. find local services. My interest related to a start-up I dealt with a few years ago who were focussed on exactly this space but whose ambitions were inhibited by the widespread absence of GPS enabled devices and cell data. Right idea, but ahead of its time in infrastructure terms.

The sad thing, as ever, is that many corporate blackberry users are denied access to many of these superb offerings because of IT department inertia or paranoia. If you don't have google maps as a minimum on your blackberry you should definitely complain.