Time to Tungle

Yeah, the number of really really (let's get ready to Tungle) type blog titles was overwhelming, sorry I picked the least corny. But we love this idea/company/people.

Tungle is the latest JLA investment.

Here's the problem.  You're are trying to schedule a meeting with people on all different calendaring products.  Getting the free/busy from everybody usually involves endless emails starting with: "How's 3p" and then a zillion emails later, etc, etc.  It is a huge time sync/pain.  Tungle basically solves the problem by making you visible to others. For example, if you have 5 people all on different exchange boxes, you can schedule a meeting as if everybody was on the same box, seeing free/busy, picking a time that works for people, sending out the invites, etc.  Tungle plans to offer this level of functionality across all calendaring programs beyond two foreign exchange boxes. Soon, you will be able to 'see' a Google user, a Lotus notes user, etc, just like they were on your internal system.  All permission based, lots of privacy settings, etc. Go here to see the full details on features, etc.

We did this investment for a number of reasons:

1. The problem is real.  I live it and anyone who has a busy/full schedule knows the process can be more efficient.

2. The team is known, done it before and very well respected.  Marc and Fang, the co-founders are guys I've personally worked with before.  Since my interactions with them, they've done other successful things and I like betting on people I know can pull rabbits out of hats.  Lots of brain power at the table, especially with the addition of  Jennifer Bell on product management front.  A+ team.

3. People will pay for this.  I expect somebody out there on some tech blog to review the product when it goes into full beta and say great things.  I also fully expect to see the line "unfortunately it's not free."   I believe people will pay for things of value and we are going to test that theory with Tungle.

4. The additional services/features are many.  Imagine everybody wanting to schedule a meeting a restaurant or group schedule an outing, etc.  Lots and lots of opportunities in the features/partnering department.

5. Low cost SaaS product.  Gotta love no touch, no downloads, just click here, pay and you are ready.

Congrats to Marc, Fang, and Jennifer on getting funding and rolling.

If you'd like to get into the beta program sign up here. If you want to go to the head of the beta list, send email to Marc at Tungle, telling him I sent ya.

Comments

[chris]

if this works well i'm their first customer.

[bizz]

i gave tungle a try but the p2p aspect didnt do it for me. i since moved to a combination of google calendar and calgoo - www.calgoo.com - it let me import my outlook apts and import a couple ical calendars in addition to the google cal sync. ive been using it since it got a good review on webworker daily.

food for thought

bizz

[Henk Kleynhans]

It looks nifty. Calendaring is definitely far from being solved in many different ways...

I think the greatest barrier is that both users have to be Tungle users.

Frequent meetings I have with my team, who all have Goocal. Infrequent meetings I would schedule with someone that I might only have met a few times, and therefore wouldn't try to convince them to sign up for a service, just in order to figure out when they are available.

Or am I missing something here?

[Marc Gingras]

Hi Henk, indeed, our research shows that 40% of people's meetings are with individuals that you don't know well and/or you meet sporadically.

Our current version of Tungle does a really good job at addressing the other 60% of meetings. It is designed to allow anyone, using different calendaring systems to share their availability before deciding on a time to meet.

We are currently working on addressing the remaining 40% that you described. Our objective is to make it fast and easy for any Tungle user to coordinate a meeting - without requiring the other party to be a Tungle user.