July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Sometimes the process of scheduling meetings takes up more time than the meetings themselves. Atlas launched a mobile scheduling app today that seeks to streamline this process.

The apps for iPhone cut down on all the back-and-forth communication and toggling between tabs that people often resort to when setting up meetings. The goal is to stay out of your inbox as much as possible while scheduling. Atlas integrates with your existing calendar products and presents you with available meeting times. You can send someone the times that work for you and they click on the time that works best for them. Appointment made.

“Scheduling right now is a two-screen nightmare for people on all sides,” said CEO Hunter Gray in an interview with VentureBeat. “We’ve taken email, the mode of communication, and the calendar, the hub of context, and put them together on one screen. Atlas fits nicely between mobile calendars and web scheduling products. It is appointment sharing, rather than calendar sharing. We think we can own that market.”

Gray graduated from Yale University and entered the realm of direct sales. He lead a force of 10,000 people and observed “massive” inefficiencies in scheduling. Salespeople out in the field were always on their mobile devices, but they waited until arriving back at their desk to figure out appointment times because it was too much of a hassle on mobile. By then, the moment had passed and people were less inclined to follow up. Along with cofounder Michel Bayan, he set out to build a better system.

In addition to appointment sharing, other features include group scheduling, where you invite people to an event and everyone checks yes, no, or maybe to find the optimal time. Users can also make themselves available, prompting others to schedule a meeting with them. Atlas has productivity features as well, like assigning tasks and notifications when others complete them.

There is a lot of activity in the mobile productivity space. Sunrise, Fantastical, Tempo, not to mention the mobile presence of companies like Asana and web schedulers like Tungle.me. Despite the competition, the founders are confident that their product addresses many of the pain points that these other applications don’t and that the technology provides a superior, cross-platform method for scheduling. Atlas isn’t trying to change the behavior of people who typically make appointments while sitting at a computer. It is for people who schedule on-the-go and want a more efficient way to do it. The app will operate on a freemium model, with a monthly subscription fee for a pro account with added features.

Atlas participated in Launchpad LA and has raised $700K from angel investors.

Photo Credit: Atlas

And adding a handy second-round funding of $1.5 million from initial backers Detroit Venture Partners and Ludlow Ventures.

“We always knew we wanted to do this,” CEO Greg Schwartz told me yesterday. “But we didn’t realize how important it would be. … It’s a pivot in terms of energy.”

The company’s mobile app integrates with the calendar app on your smartphone, focusing not just on your own events but on the future events that friends, family, and colleagues consider important. You can also share events out to your UpTo connections – Schwartz described it as the Instagram of calendars last time I talked to him: a layer on top of your calendar, just as Instagram is a layer on top of your camera.

People used it, Apple featured the app in the App Store, and downloads grew, but access to public streams grew even faster. Last year UpTo tentatively opened up the platform to public streams, and pro sports teams, organizational calendars, speaking tours, and organizations jumped on the new capability, to the point where there are now more than 2000 streams of events on the UpTo system .

The problem with that growth? Most of them have been placed there by the company itself.

So now Schwartz is opening up the platform, allowing any business, school, club, or organization to create their own event streams. Interested users can subscribe to those streams, and organizations can also embed live UpTo calendar streams on their websites, for an experience Schwartz says is much more dynamic and social than the standard static event pages.

It’s good timing, as user growth is coming faster than ever: UpTo has had more downloads in the last 45 days than in the previous year. And it’s also a smart one-step-removed user acquisition strategy.

“It’s a B-to-B-to-C user acquisition strategy,” Schwartz explains.

Once organizations join, their members and fans join, meaning that one “sale” (the app and the event stream are currently free) generates hundreds or even thousands of installs.

This is a much bigger vision, and a much bigger product than UpTo had envisioned before. It’s essentially the social network of tomorrow: What’s happening, who’s attending, which friends will be there, and which ones do I want to attend? And it will bring some new competition, too, as UpTo enters space occupied by companies like Eventful and Meetup.

For Schwartz, Upto doesn’t always need to be in the forefront.

“It’s not all about downloading the app or using the app,” he says. “You might experience UpTo and maybe not even realize it. It’s a more distributed approach.”

Schwartz wants to work with companies like Eventful and Meetup, and it is actively pursuing Facebook as well to bring in Facebook events natively and share events from UpTo not as status updates but as Facebook events. The goal is a future in which when users like the Detroit Lions or New York Yankees, for instance, UpTo and Facebook can then recommend other event streams they might be interested in.

The pivot, such as it is, was mostly due to good fortune, Schwartz suggests:

“We sort of got lucky that we were able to experiment, bring a few streams into the app,” he says. “Then we gave people the ability to suggest streams … and huge traffic resulted.”

That sort of luck is how startups stop being startups and start being contenders, and the new round of funding from existing investors Detroit Venture Partners and Ludlow Ventures, both based in Detroit, will help.

photo credit: Mike Rohde via photopin cc

The product is called Sunrise. It is a “smart” and “beautiful” email digest of your day. Founders Jeremy Le Van and Pierre Valade were high up designers at Foursquare. Disappointed by the available calendar options, they decided to create an alternative that puts user experience at the forefront. 

The platform connects APIs from anywhere people might have a calendar, including Facebook, Google Calendar, LinkedIn, and Eventbrite. It merges all of the information in an attractive email that arrives in your inbox every morning. It is optimized for mobile, since around 50% of users open the digest from their smartphones, and it includes integration with LinkedIn that pulls in profiles of people you’re scheduled to meet.

Sunrise also offers relevant information about the weather, birthdays, and addresses, so everything you need to go about your day is consolidated in one place.

“Calendars is one space that hasn’t really evolved in the past years, and it’s time to connect all the information together in a smart way,” said Valade. “When users wake up, it’s already their routine to check their emails, so we are in the natural flow they’re used to. It is both simple and powerful. We designed at least 25 different variations before finding the right one that will work both on mobile and desktop. I think we’ve designed the best email ever.”

Valade and Le Van left Foursquare earlier this year for this project and are still in the early stages. The team is just two people, and they have not yet set out to fundraise. Of their early adopters, 50% open their Sunrise every day, which Valade said is high compared to traditional emails. This design-focused duo is committed to constant iteration, to make Sunrise as user-friendly as possible, and to “solve calendars.”

Sunrise is based in New York.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

DETROIT — If Facebook is about what you did yesterday, and Twitter is about what you’re doing right now, UpTo is about what you’re planning to do tomorrow — and sharing with those you actually know.

UpTo is a social network based on your calendar. Alternatively, it’s a social replacement for your calendar. Or it’s just a way of seeing what is happening in your neighborhood and for those you care about, in the near future.

Or possibly, all four — in the form of an iPhone app.

I had a chance to sit down with UpTo’s chief executive, Greg Schwartz, on my current tour of Detroit-based startups. He gave me a tour of the updated app — and some insider info on what’s coming soon.

“The calendar has not evolved,” he said, for decades. “It’s still the same singular view of your own life.”

And while Twitter and Facebook are great for sharing, by the time you share and others read … they have missed out on the event. Or you have missed out on a great event that, if only you had known, you would have liked to attend. So while Facebook owns the social graph and Twitter the interest graph, UpTo is focusing on the intent graph: what you will be doing in the future.

The app proved its worth when Schwartz connected with one of the investors in UpTo on the app and saw that he was meeting Jason Calacanis. Schwartz immediately asked him to rep UpTo to Calacanis, and within a few weeks he found himself onstage at LAUNCH conference.

The timing of my visit to Detroit was unexpectedly excellent, as UpTo just released a new version into the app store yesterday, which the official @AppStore account tweeted out last night and Apple promoted as a featured app in the app store today.

That’s as good as it gets for a mobile startup, and the team was celebrating with high fives, hugs, and a special cake with a message I promised not to reveal (although I will say: One word rhymed with “witches”).

I asked Schwartz to walk me through the app:

“It’s very similar to Instagram being a layer on top of your existing camera,” Schwartz said. “UpTo doesn’t replace your calendar … it adds to it.”

It seamlessly integrates with the native calendar on your iPhone. Any events you add on the standard Calendar app are automatically synced to UpTo (and are set as private by default). And any events you add on UpTo are synced to the native iPhone calendar.

When you’re using the app with friends, family, and coworkers, the result is amazing insight into what’s happening in the next days and weeks for those you care about. It’s simple just to browse what’s upcoming. And it may be even more powerful to view groups and individuals to see both what they’re doing — and how busy they are, or when they’re available.

“We spent about a year really trying to figure out the calendar piece,” Schwartz says, and the effort shows. “There are a lot of calendaring apps out there, and there’s a lot of challenges in making a great one.”

The app is a free download. UpTo is focusing on user acquisition right now, adding 55,000 in the last three months (that number will rise dramatically as a featured app.) Eventually, with scale, Shwartz sees monetization opportunities in intent-based advertising, affiliate revenue from ticket purchases, and such, and a software-as-a-service models with organizations.

And the news?

The new version of UpTo now supports calendar streams from sports teams or other organizations you care about, events in your industry, and more. It’s part of the onboarding experience — UpTo wants to make sure that new users have more than just their own personal events in their calendars — and it’s an acknowledgement that your important events aren’t just to-do’s or meetings.

In addition, UpTo just completed a $500,000 seed round with participation from existing investors Detroit Venture Partners and Ludlow Ventures.

And, probably the biggest news is that UpTo is launching a fully native Android app next month with deep calendar integration.

“On those big-screen Android phones, UpTo just looks amazing,” Schwartz said.

Next on the agenda for Schwartz, in true founder fashion, is a Series A funding round. But if the team’s execution continues at this pace, and the Android launch is as successful as the iOS version is becoming, that doesn’t look like it will be a problem.

But the company gave VentureBeat a sneak peek today.

The single most popular tool? Überpopular file-sharing, storage, and back-up service DropBox. Evernote, the electronic memory app, comes in at No. 4.

The number of times Google shows up on the list is simply shocking, although I supposed it shouldn’t be. Google make no less than seven appearances in to the top 25, including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Voice, Google Calendar, Google Alerts, Google AdWords, and Google Analytics.

(Add Google Search to the list of freelancer tools and I’m guessing seven would magically transform to eight.)

One fly in this survey’s ointment? The company only surveyed about 100 entrepreneurs. If I remember anything at all from my university statistics course, that might give it a reliability factor of don’t-have-a-freaking-clue.

In any case, here’s the infographic.

Little contest: as you check it out … count how many services you use or have used, and put your number in the comments. Will your score beat mine? My number is 17.

Photo credit: female freelancer/ShutterStock

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1calendar is unveiling its solution, Celcat 1calendar Exchange, at the DEMO Fall 2011 conference today. The Copenhagen, Denmark-based company is targeting its software at schools and universities. After all, nobody wants to miss classes, show up late for events, or forget an important milestone for a child.

1calendar’s software is sold as an add-on to its partner Celcat’s scheduling services. With school calendars, the Celcat 1calendar can seamlessly integrate your Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar with the school calendar, which typically is based on Microsoft’s Exchange software. Usually, parents have to manually type calendar events into their Outlook calendars, a tedious process that is error prone. 1calendar automatically imports the school calendar into your own and notifies you when changes occur.

The service authenticates a student’s identity, locates the appropriate school schedule, and creates a web-based calendar with synchronized, real-time updates for mobile apps. It also supports private events and e-learning platforms.

Daniel Daugaard, chief executive, said in an interview that the company’s goal is to aggregate a variety of data sources to make a student’s life less complicated.

“This is what we call Calendar 2.0,” he said.

While schools are often on tight budgets, Daugaard said the system can wind up making schools money. 1calendar does the integration with schools and handles all the hosting and maintenance required for its institutional clients. If a school wants to make money on the app, it can do so with 1calendar’s in-app ad system. 1calendar gets a share of the proceeds.

1calendar is fully customizable; you can add a school’s logo and colors to the web and mobile apps.

It scales to thousands of users and requires no maintenance. You can access your calendar on your iPhone, Blackberry and Android phones as well. 1calendar automatically connects with Facebook, allowing you to keep track of all of your friends’ invitations, events and birthdays. And it may integrate with Twitter in the future.

One convenient aspect is that a student can choose to get particular schedules, such as the field hockey team’s schedule.  If a schedule is variable, then the 1calendar service is very valuable because it is harder to keep track of a complex schedule on paper. One of the future features will be to share calendars with groups of friends, Daugaard said.

1calendar has raised $825,000 to date from Seed Capital and Frey Software. It has six employees and was founded by Daugaard and Jakub Roztocil in 2010. Competitors include oMbiel, Eveoh, Blackboard Mobile, Google Apps EDU (indirect competition), Microsoft Live@EDU, and EMS Master Calendar. 1calendar says it has an edge because it has partnered with all of the major scheduling providers in the world. And it has partnered with England’s Celcat to bring 1calendar to 400 different college and university clients.

1calendar says its testing in Denmark has been very successful. After debuting at DEMO, the company plans to launch premium services in 2012. In the meantime, 1calendar can collect about 20 cents per student per year when the schools adopt it software. 1calendar has about a half dozen employees, not counting contractors, and it is raising a round of money.

Since Celcat is based in the United Kingdom and has a lot of customers in Australia, those are the areas where 1calendar will focus its marketing efforts at the outset. Full told, more than six million students attend the schools where Celcat handles scheduling. Daugaard said he will visit 70 schools in the coming weeks in an effort to sign up as many as possible. He thinks the company could close the year with 30 to 40 schools under contract.

1calendar is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Rather than getting all their office apps from one vendor, he said, the best strategy in the enterprise space — and now the consumer space — is to find a service that wraps together the best apps from multiple companies that all do one thing very well.

Box.net (which specializes in enterprise cloud storage) is moving in that direction by adding the ability to access and use files from other companies like customer relationship management software provider Salesforce.com and Google Docs, an online document editor. That’s also a strategy that companies like Microsoft and Apple seem to be avoiding, Levie said.

“With iCloud, Apple’s … seeing the cloud as a way to connect their devices together and their software,” Levie said. “We think it’s moving in the direction of openness, by combining the tools together and making it work seamlessly.”

iCloud is Apple’s next iteration of MobileMe, which will include access to online mail, contacts, and calendar applications. When a user makes a new contact or calendar entry on his or her iOS device, the entry is automatically put in the cloud and then pushed to all other iOS devices. If you ever change that information, it is automatically updated on all devices. Apple chief executive Steve Jobs also talked about three other new iCloud apps — Documents, Photo Stream, and iTunes in the Cloud — when he unveiled the service in June.

Levie said that Microsoft was attempting to do the same thing with Office 365, the company’s online version of its flagship Office software. It’s a cloud-based version of Office and gives customers access to document editing, email, customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software under a single blanket.

Box.net’s strategy is to do one thing — cloud storage — and be very good at it. And if Levie’s prediction of where the market’s heading plays out, the company could see a big payoff. The startup seems to have investors convinced that it’s on the right road — it just managed to raise a $48 million round of funding that it will use to double its engineering and sales staffs. On the other hand, it’s difficult to discount Microsoft and Apple’s strategies — with market caps of $209 billion and $300 billion respectively, they certainly have a lot of weight behind them.

But Box.net does currently has 6 million users. Some 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That figure is up from around 66 percent in February. The company is also no stranger to mobile — as of January, its iPhone application recorded more than 250,000 downloads and its Android application had been downloaded more than 70,000 times.

“We can only build so much and of our limited time we want to be the best place to store and manage your data,” Levie said. “The competition thinks very differently.”

Users will be able to select a section of the day they would like to block off for appointments, which can be split into any type of time block (e.g. 30 minute slots). Each Google account will also have its own appointments sign-up page that users will access to book appointments. That page can also be embedded into personal websites.

Google uses the example of college professors booking appointments with students and hair dressers as some of the obvious candidates for the service.

The new feature will begin rolling out today, according to the official Gmail blog. The blog post didn’t indicated if people booking appointments need a Google account or whether the new feature would roll out for Google’s enterprise app accounts.

I was hoping to get the feature before this post went up so I could offer some initial feedback but I’m still waiting for Google to enable my account. For now, check out the initial screen shots from Google’s blog post.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) announced this morning that it has acquired Tungle.me, a calendar scheduling application, for an undisclosed sum of money.

Tungle.me, which launched at DEMO in 2007, offers a service to synchronize and schedule meetings across various calendaring applications — including Microsoft’s Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal. Additionally, it helps prevent timezone and double-booking conflicts, and integrates with devices such as Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s own BlackBerry.

The service has managed to build a fair amount of traction since launching, currently put into use by 40 percent of Fortune 1000 companies and over 800 universities around the world.

While RIM has yet to mention what it plans to do with the service, the company is most likely going to keep it running in its current form, going by its similar past acquisitions of Gist, an e-mail contact manager, and DataViz, a document platform for Outllook.

The Montreal, Canada-based startup was founded by Marc Gingras. It raised $6.36 million over two funding rounds, with investors that included Desjardins Venture Capital, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and JLA Ventures.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Managing a busy schedule can be a difficult talk. Now a startup called CalendarFly is looking to provide a helping hand with its free calendar solution uniquely targeted at parents, teachers, coaches and organizational leaders.

At DEMO, CalendarFly will show how its social calendar allows users to easily update their schedules and share it with chosen groups. The main user interface is set up as around a central calendar where users can create tasks for various days. Groups can also be created so that the user can pick and choose who gets to see specific tasks. The system also has a labeling tool which helps in identifying tasks, such as event, test, practice, or holiday.

Imagine you’re a teacher and your students have an exam on Friday, for example, with CalendarFly you can aggregate all the parents that use CalendarFly into one group. Then, once an task is officially entered, they will automatically see it on their own schedules. No phone calls, emails or written notes to try to get a hold of parents.

The service competes with well established calendar solutions, like Google, but also has competitors targeting parents and schools with online calendars, including Cozi and MyFamily.com.

The Pelham, New York-based company has raised an initial angel round of funding of $75,000 thus far with an additional $100,000 waiting in escrow.