Yesterday I wrote about coverage of the BlackBerry PlayBook launch, partially inspired by three pages of coverage in last weekend’s Globe and Mail Report on Business. But I left with the question of whether competitive comparisons with the iPad are valid or can the PlayBook provide new market directions for tablets.

Certainly on content and applications, at the moment iPad has built up a significant following. But RIM has brought together a variety of technologies that could prove to be the infrastructure for a range of tablet-size intelligent devices. As Alec Saunders, who has experience with platform launches as the initial Product Manager for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, says in Playbook: Maybe just right on target:

No product team has ever produced a fully realized product on version 1.  It’s simply not possible.  Case in point: Apple’s version 1 iPhone was roundly panned as underpowered, with terrible battery life, poor reception, and no applications.  Recall that in the early days, Apple insisted that the only applications that you would ever need on iPhone could be written as web applications.  How wrong Apple was.  To its credit, Apple recognized the flaw, and pivoted quickly.

Alec went on to corroborate my statement about the user experience:

In general the media are having difficulty separating the  technology from the user experience. We have yet to see real user experiences that evolve from the technology behind the platform.

with his statement:

It’s not until a product meets the market that a product team can begin to listen to customers and work on delivering the feature set that customers really want to buy.

So let’s take a look from the technology perspective and RIM’s recent strategic acquisitions:

• Security: in early 2009 RIM acquired Certicom,  the company behind RIM’s robust security that has lead to BlackBerry’s acceptance by government agencies in Canada, U.S. and Europe.
• Robust OS and Multi-tasking¹: The QNX acquisition last year gave RIM a very robust multi-tasking real time operating system (RTOS) that is the answer to “Would you trust this to run an airplane? (or at least your spacecraft)” QNX, with its multi-processor support, is embedded in devices and software worldwide with customers such as Cisco and all the major automobile manufacturers. This is perhaps the most important acquisition RIM has made (I have been aware of the Ottawa-based company and its unique feature set since its founding in the mid-1980’s.)
• Well behaved browser: RIM acquired Torch Mobile in the summer of 2009 and built their webkit-based browser into BlackBerry OS 6. All I can say here is that, with my BlackBerry Torch experience, browsing to websites is no longer a time consuming gamble.
• Last September RIM acquired Dataviz, publisher of the Documents To Go utilities that allow you to easily read and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents as well as read PDF files on BlackBerry, iPad/iPhone, Android and even Maemo devices. Ironically I have purchased their Premium product for not only BlackBerry but also iPad.
• The recent acquisition of Swedish “The Astonishing Tribe” has brought significant mobile device user interface technology and experience into the fold.

Combining these acquisitions technology with the technology behind their legacy wireless and messaging experience, RIM’s challenge is to build devices that can deliver unique user experiences. But that only comes from the combination of developer innovation and user feedback – one reason for a launch today without a complete set of applications (including a native email application). The developers have had their chance to get some experience but now the users can talk back.

In my next post I’ll outline some of my expectations combining my own mobile experiences (BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad) with what I can see these technologies bringing into the picture in the future.

Update, April 27, 2011: RIM continues to buy additional technology. Today it was announced that RIM is acquiring Tungle, the meeting accelerator offering that makes for easy scheduling across multiple time zones and calendar applications.

Other posts:

• Voice On The Web: BlackBerry Playbook: iPad Competitor or Another New Category of Appliance?
• Alec Saunders SquawkBox: Playbook: Maybe just right on target.
• Globe and Mail Report on Business: BlackBerry PlayBook tries to chart a path between work and fun.
• Globe and Mail Report on Business: RIM’s edge: an operating system that ‘kicks ass’

¹RIM has long been a leader in true multi-tasking on wireless devices. Their original BlackBerry was powered by the Intel 386 chip, the same virtual machine processor that gave me an employment opportunity selling a multi-tasking environment for use with MS-DOS. RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaradis reminds me of this every time we discuss our multi-tasking experiences.

Related articles

• BlackBerry Playbook launches quietly in Toronto (thestar.com)
• BlackBerry PlayBook gets real today; AT&T blocking updates already (zdnet.com)

Over the past two years I have been occasionally reporting on Tungle, the meeting accelerator that facilitates scheduling meetings and conference calls. Tungle’s goals as a service are:

• bring down barriers, such as different calendar programs, between companies and work teams
• share availability (Busy/Free status only)
• respect privacy and user control

In summary Tungle wants to be “the last mile” for booking a meeting.

Since my last report a year ago on the introduction of the Tungle.me feature, Tungle has added several features including:

• a BlackBerry client available via the BlackBerry app store,
• participation in Google Apps Market Place
• addition of Plancast to its existing social networking integrations with Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn, Ning, etc. and
• integration into Lotus Notes.

Basically Tungle has been building up an infrastructure and partner relationships that accelerate meeting scheduling across your email contacts and social networks. Key to its success is that individual users of Tungle can be agnostic with respect to their calendaring program. Tungle works with Outlook, Google Calendar and Lotus Notes as well as iCal and Entourage on the Mac. And it adapts to a user’s local time zone; Tungle has users in over 100 countries across all the world’s time zones.

At the same time Tungle has evolved its various user interfaces to make Tungle much more readily accepted by both the meeting organizer and the invitees. Key here was the removal of the need for an invitee to actually be registered with Tungle. Simply receive a Tungle invitation via email, click on a link, show your available times and the meeting organizer can move ahead with scheduling a meeting, including sending meeting time confirmation emails.

But there were still many opportunities to improve Tungle and further accelerate meetings. Today Tungle is announcing Tungle.me 2.0 with several new features that “extend the application’s social networking features with the addition of a public directory, search functionality, and group meeting capabilities”.

Modify Your “Weekly Availability”

A year ago Tungle introduced Tungle.me where you could, at your discretion, show times you are available for meetings on a “weekly” basis from a URL, “tungle.me/username”, that could become, say, part of an email signature. Your Tungle.Me availability would automatically be modified as you reserved times slots in your calendar application. As the first of several new features introduced today, users can also edit or customize those availabilities on a daily basis should you decide to take time off for a golf game, have a “must attend” family event or have the boss second you into a short term project.

Tungle.Me Public Directory and Search

Since introducing Tungle.me Tungle has also discretely developed a Tungle.Me public directory accompanied by Tungle.me Search. Provided a user gives appropriate permission, you can now search Tungle’s public directory for a particular user and see if they have made their availability information accessible to schedule one-on-one meetings. Over 85% of Tungle users have given the appropriate permission; recall that only your “Free/Busy” time availability is shown – with no details of why a time slot is tied up or an associated meeting location. But Tungle Search simply becomes one more contributor to a key new feature.

Accelerating Meeting Scheduling Through Aggregation

A major issue that has held up the time taken to schedule multi-participant meetings was the need to have responses from at least a significant portion of the potential participants. This could take two or three days waiting for responses while others are tentatively holding time slots open in the back-of-their-minds if not on their calendar.

Yet, as mentioned above, the information of their availability, if a registered Tungle.me user, is accessible. Today’s announcement is about accelerating meetings through aggregation. Simply go to your Tungle.me Home page (www.tungle.me/username), select contacts who have made their information available and you have an overlay showing what time slots are available. Bingo! Set either the suggestions for a meeting time and send an invite email with pre-qualified time slots or just set a meeting time, if appropriate in context. (Another hint: cursor over an individual contact’s name to overlay a view of the individual’s availability.)

In the graphic below, purple represent my own committed time slots for this week, light blue represent committed time slots of three other invitees to the prospective meeting.

Tungle.Me Groups

While the above process helps to set up one-time meetings, for teams or groups that meet frequently, Tungle.me’s most powerful new feature is the creation of contact Groups. Much like the Group Contact feature in Skype you can designate the members of a group and create the Group as an additional contact. Want to see when your group can get together, simply click on the Group’s name in your Tungle Contact list. You will immediately see the available times at which your Group can come together. Best part of Groups: you can create a URL, “www.tungle.me/username/groupname”, so that all members of your group can quickly see the group’s availability from any web browser.

Two overriding guidelines to Tungle.me’s new features:

1. Privacy – you only make public your available times. No information is provided about why your time slots are tied up or where you will be physically.

2. Aggregate availability to show common times available for meetings with one or two mouse clicks.

Tungle CEO Marc Gingras has provided a short demonstration video to provide a more dynamic introduction:

Bottom Line (and Full Disclosure): I have been using Tungle and Tungle.me for the past two years, witnessing its evolution into a fully featured, easy-to-use service. Consistently their goal has been to improve the user interface, making it a “no-brainer” service to use whether a meeting participant is a registered user or not.

Fifteen years  ago I was taking up to a week to schedule cross-company meetings via emails. Tungle brings the process down to a few easy to follow steps that pull together readily accessible user information and time slots through one service platform such that a meeting can be scheduled within hours, if not minutes. No longer simply an aggregator of user availability, Tungle, incorporating its own social networking ecosystem, has become a key social networking tool that can facilitate the real time “social sharing” envisioned by Skype’s Jonathan Rosenberg at his recent eComm keynote.

Tungle CEO Marc Gingras has also put up a few blog posts with more details on these new features:

• Search and Directory
• Tungle.me Groups
• More new features
• Concerned about privacy? Don’t be

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tungle and Plancast Partner to Bring Together Social Calendar Sharing & Scheduling (eon.businesswire.com)
• Tungle makes scheduling meetings a bit easier (bbgeeks.com)
• Cloud Synergies: Lotus Notes Adds Tungle, Tripit and Gist (readwriteweb.com)
• Tungle.me for IBM Lotus Notes Collaboration Software Now Available; Makes Scheduling Meetings Easier for the Many Millions of Lotus Notes Users Worldwide (eon.businesswire.com)
• InnerPass 2.0 – Exposing Skype’s Collaboration Potential to Over Two Million Users (voiceontheweb.biz)

Over the past eighteen months I have often reported on iotum’s Calliflower voice conferencing service as it has evolved and matured. For the first time in a few months I had occasion to use it once again yesterday evening. Connecting  11 participants in the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto triangle, New York and Virginia, I can report on an excellent quality, two hour and ten minute call with no interruptions where everyone was clearly understood. (Even the dogs co-operated by not barking in the background although someone’s cell phone did ring at one point.) And it’s archived for access by all members of the group, including those who could not participate in the call.

However, not only has the overall consistency of call quality improved but calls hosted by a Premium Service subscriber ($50/month for two organizers, unlimited calling and participants) can now be accessed “locally” from over 100 cities in 30 countries:

Calliflower flat-rate conferencing services are now available in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

If there was one improvement that could be made it would be to make it more obvious on the invitation emails that a participant should RSVP whether they will/may/will not attend. As demonstrated with recent enhancements to Tungle, the meeting scheduling service, invitation emails must clearly explain all the steps to be taken to respond to the invitation appropriately. In my case yesterday, I was sending invitation emails to “newbies” unfamiliar with the service; some did not know how to respond. As a result I had to send separate emails to non-responding participants to ensure they knew how to access the service.  The issue has been reported to iotum personnel who now have this issue as a “ToDo” item on their action list.

And how much of a value is this service? Ten years ago, using Bell Canada conferencing service, the 11-party call I mentioned in the introduction would have cost $787.00 with additional minutes at a cost of $0.55 per minute per participant just for the voice service. How business models change! But with Calliflower you can also see who is on the call, manage participation through muting and hand raising, share documents, augment the conversation through a chat window and record/archive the call.

Bottom line: with a rewording of their email invitations, Calliflower certainly delivers on its offering of unlimited calling from over 100 cities worldwide along with tools that enhance the conversation. During last night’s call, Calliflower went into the background and was transparent to the discussion; we accomplished our meeting agenda and objectives uninterrupted by the technology.

Overlooked: Calliflower conference calls can also be scheduled, accessed and moderated via their iPhone application.

Click here for more details about the Calliflower service

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• Calliflower expands: Flat Rate International Conference Calls now available from 30 Countries. (saunderslog.com)

Recently I wrote about the official launch of Tungle, the meeting accelerator that provides a cross-platform,  cross-calendar service for scheduling meetings via the web. In fact, with its new features I am now finding that 100% of my meeting requests have a response that results in a meeting. In other words the released version addressed issues that were roadblocks to successfully, yet productively agreeing on a meeting time.

One could call Tungle’s initial invocation as providing an “outbound” method for scheduling a meeting as you were the initiator from either a browser or email program, such as Outlook and expected to be the moderator of the meeting.

But what if someone wanted to approach you to request a meeting but was not a Tungle subscriber. With the launch yesterday of Tungle.me your non-subscribing acquaintances can launch a request for a meeting with you via Facebook, LinkedIn, a blog or website, your e-mail signature or an IM text chat message via Skype, MSN Messenger, etc.

When a visitor clicks on the resulting widget or link, the visitor will see a web page showing your busy/available times (but no details). You then go into the “Organize a Meeting” mode where, if the visitor is a Tungle subscriber, the subscriber’s busy/available times will also be displayed:

One then proceeds to fill in the standard information (suggested time slots, location, potential agenda) and the normal Tungle Accelerator goes into action emailing invitations and accepting responses.

Whereas originally Tungle was available for outbound requests, Tungle.me provides a path for inbound meeting requests via social media tools and other communications services.

Bottom line: A cool service; however, while providing the ability to receive Inbound meeting requests, you may also want to consider how public you want to make your availability known to the outside world. On the other hand, by once again not requiring non-subscribers to register, Tungle has minimized the barriers and obstacles to using this service.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tungle: A Meeting Scheduler for the Cloud (voiceontheweb.biz)
• SocialScope: Why BlackBerry? (voiceontheweb.biz)

For the past two years, I have been occasionally beta testing Tungle, a hosted meeting scheduler platform that now supports a range of popular Calendaring applications across Windows and Mac OSX PC’s as well as all the popular browsers, including Google Chrome. Tungle’s primary goal is to make scheduling meetings a simple process for both the meeting organizer and the invited participants.

Last Tuesday Tungle was launched to the general public; at the time I published a Web Worker Daily post: Tungle: Schedule Meetings “Your Way” where I covered in some detail the various business and user experience issues the Tungle team had uncovered and addressed leading up to this launch.

The Tungle browser interface provides availability information (for both yourself and any of your contacts who have authorized sharing of their availability information). Once participants have responded to narrow down to an appropriate time, either the organizer or last responding participant can set the time. This time is then automatically entered back into each participant’s individual PIM calendar. The full feature set can be found here.

Most important was their focus on the user experience, both for setting up the meeting and responding to invitations. In this regard the Tungle team:

• made the service entirely browser-based; there are no downloads required. Tungle will synchronize to your address book contacts and your PIM’s calendar; however, there is no trace left on your local PC.
• the invitation email sent out to meeting participants was worded to ensure a “no brainer” response to the invitation. Most importantly there is no need to sign up for the service when responding to the invitation
• made Tungle smartphone adaptable. Should an invitation be read on an iPhone, BlackBerry or other smartphone, it is reformatted in a manner appropriate to the underlying smartphone browser. Once again it is easy for an invitee to respond from their smartphone.
• established three calendar sharing options: detailed, busy/available and no sharing.
• set up automatic adjustment to the meeting participants’ time zone; most useful when scheduling international calls via Skype
• made it easier for participants to respond via a browser. For invitations received via a PC platform, the invitee is sent to a browser page where there are “bubble’s to guide the invitee through the response process.
• developed a simple “Meet With Me” service that one can put on a website or enter into an email signature to trigger a meeting request with the originator of the MeetWithMe URL.

Tungle, in some sense, could almost be considered the ultimate mashup:

• cross platform: works with both Windows and Mac OSX
• browser support: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Google Chrome
• calendars supported: Outlook, MS Exchange, iCal, Google Calendar, Entourage, Lotus Live (Notes)
• Google Maps – this is a most impressive mashup: select the “Find a Location” link adjacent to the (optional) Location field, enter appropriate search terms and get results to select your meeting location.

Going forward Tungle is looking at integration with web conferencing services and social networking applications. But in the meantime I find it most useful for scheduling international Skype calls where time zone differences are not readily obvious.

Bottom line: give Tungle a try; simply register for the service and use it in your favorite browser; no downloads required. The best part: it’s free. There are plans to launch premium services later this year but at the moment Tungle’s goal is simply to make the service addictive.

Give Tungle a try and report on your experience in the Comments.

Other posts:

• Financial Times (free registration): Seats at the virtual table
• Web Worker Daily: Tungle: Schedule Meetings Your Way (also syndicated via GigaOm to New York Times and CNN Money)

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• Google Chrome Heads For Mac (ubergizmo.com)

New service provides format- and platform-agnostic meeting scheduling and co-ordination across the web.

To date groupware’s ability to perform meeting scheduling and coordination was limited to within an enterprise’s groupware community of users — i.e. – the employees and perhaps closely connected business associates. And everyone had to be using a common calendaring system running under a common operating system. Yet, studies show that over 60% of meetings will involve invitees who are not within this “enterprise cloud”. Half of those “non-cloud” invitees do have a “good” relationship with the enterprise; the other half are those with whom employees would have “sporadic” meetings.

Tungle is an Internet-based service that provides the ability to share availability and manage meeting scheduling across the web. Currently the designated organizer of the meeting (who does not have to be an attendee) must be using Microsoft Outlook; however, the invitees can be running on any platform, whether Windows, Mac or even Blackberry; they simply need a web browser. And they can be using any calendaring application whether Outlook Calendar, Google Calendar, Mac’s iCal, or within groupware such as Lotus Notes.

Tungle Contact Management

The Tungle client for meeting organizers has a single-click install as an Outlook plug-in. Upon installation it then searches your Outlook for both Contacts and your availability according to your Outlook Calendar. If it finds other Contacts who also have installed Tungle it marks them with an identifier “T” logo. You may then invite individual contacts to “share” their availability; those are the ones identified with the “T” logo on a solid purple background. Select one of those contacts and you will see in the Calendar screen that contact’s availability.

The other section of the Tungle client comprises a Calendar which initially shows your own availability for the current (5-day or 7-day) week. This Calendar section is where you initiate the coordination of a meeting – selecting contacts, entering a subject and designating the time slots you (or the primary “chair” of the meeting) would have available for potential meeting times. You can also designate whether or not you will be attending the meeting – a feature that is ideal for executive administrators.

Tungle Calendar Mashup

The example on the left shows the sharing of availability across an organizer and three other contacts, shown by the different colors, who are also on Tungle. (Were the organizer not attending the purple slots would go away.) The organizer would then “paint” in blank potential time slots for the proposed meeting. Upon completion of this information, click on the “Create Space” button and another window pops up where you can see a summary of the invitees and proposed time slots and as well as enter more detailed information about the potential meeting such as an agenda. Click on the “Send” button and an email, from the meeting organizer, about the prospective meeting goes out to each invitee, incorporating a link.

Tungle Invite on BlackBerry

The link is to a “Tungle Space” which is a dynamic web page, viewable in any web browser, that shows all the meeting information and allows invitees to select which of the proposed time slots s/he prefers. If the invitee reads the email on a Blackberry, the Tungle Space is reformatted for appropriate display on the Blackberry. Note that, until a final meeting time is set, the Tungle Space is updated with any changes in availability of those who have a Tungle client installed.

There are two ways a final meeting time can be set:

• The organizer can visit the Tungle Space at any time and designate a meeting time regardless whether or not all invitees have responded, or
• Once the last invitee has visited the Tungle Space to select her/his available meeting times, Tungle will then automatically select a meeting time.

Once a meeting time is selected an email goes out to all invitees announcing the meeting time. Those invitees who are also on Tungle will have their Outlook Calendars appropriately populated. But here is one of the key features: the other invitees can click on a link that inserts the meeting time into their respective calendaring program regardless of whether whether they use Google Calendar, iCal, Lotus Notes or any other popular Calendaring program.

In an interview with Tungle CEO Marc Gingras he pointed out:

• ease-of- user was a key design criteria; this is an offering that has been over a year in the development.
• recognizing which Calendar format an invitee had was another major technical challenge
• Tungle will be adding clients for users of Google Calendar and iCal (you can sign up on the website for notification)
• the team is still working on additional features incorporating feedback from the current beta phase.

The entire structure is set up to ensure adequate privacy; only information you agree to share is shared. In fact, as with Skype, while users’ email addresses are registered by Tungle and used to determine who amongst your Contacts is on Tungle, this information is never give out at any point. There is even a double opt-in process for ensuring that you are, in fact, the owner of any email address that you register with Tungle.

Personally I have used Tungle over the past week with great success. It’s simple to install and eliminates lots of non-productive time exchanging emails with various meeting time slot proposals (or even making voice calls to finalize details). . In fact, Tungle appears to be one of those rare productivity applications whose value is quickly appreciated the first time you use it.

Going forward I have suggested API’s that could link Tungle as a front end for hosts organizing VAPPS HiDef Conferencing sessions (or even Skype Conference call sessions); I can also foresee where deeper direct integration into Blackberry Calendar or CRM applications, such as Salesforce.com, would be useful. And it’s ideal for Skylook users who already are archiving their Skype conversations into Outlook. Tungle does have plans for making this an integral web-based “social networking” tool that is “just there” when you have to organize a meeting.

So, if you are an Outlook user, download Tungle here and get organizing!

Tags: Tungle, Marc Gingras, Outlook, Google Calendars, Lotus Notes, iCal

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