VentureBeat

Two-and-a-half year old startup TimeBridge is launching its flagship scheduling product today, and it’s a product that shines with simplicity.

Plenty of internet startups have made a business out of saving time for busy professionals. TimeBridge’s niche is cutting down the time it takes to schedule meetings. It’s product, Personal Scheduling Manager, works on reaching consensus through a straightforward visual interface, a clear improvement over the process of emailing back and forth between all a meeting’s participants that most organizers use.

Here’s how it works: The program, which is a small download for Microsoft Outlook users or a web app for Google adherents, syncs with the user’s calendar to show which time slots are open. The user, who we’ll assume is initiating the meeting, can then highlight blocks of time that would be acceptable for a meeting.

Invitations are then sent off to the other participants, who can see all the times the organizer has available and choose their own set of open time slots. Through a process of elimination, the times that other participants can’t make it to a meeting are ruled out, and a confirmation for the best time is sent out to everyone.

TimeBridge’s CEO, Yori Nelken, says it took two years to build the product, a claim that’s hard to believe in light of how quick and simple it is to use. But that’s what a good web app does — fits in seamlessly with a user’s life, then stays out of the way as much as possible.

One caution — we’ve been skeptical before that yet another scheduling company might have a chance to make it. TimeBridge is clearly an additional feature for calendars, not an entire stand-alone product. If anything it’s the fragmentation of the market, with different users going to Outlook, Google, or their PDA for their calendar, that provides an opening for another service to tie them together for users.

The company plans to make money by making deals with other business programs, for instance, suggesting a web conferencing program to users who plan on holding a remote meeting. It could also offer a white-label version of its Personal Scheduling Manager to interested companies.

TimeBridge is based in San Francisco, Calif. The company raised $6 million last year from Mayfield Fund and Norwest Venture Partners, and plans to start raising another round in January.

Renkoo, a Redwood City start-up that has worked in secrecy for a year on a more interactive version of Evite’s event service, has launched.

Evite is the big player in this industry. Renkoo pitches itself as “Evite done right,” seeking to incorporate Web 2.0 features. It has been testing its product with a select group of users for months. Several other start-ups are in the invitation/event management race, including the trio in San Francisco: Skobee, Socializr and Timebridge, all at various levels of testing and development.

Renkoo, though, has taken the technology high-ground. The service lets you correspond with people in real time while arranging events, using an advanced AJAX technology called Comet. You register at the homepage, and then you can invite people (if they are not a member, they get an invite) and chat with them live as if you are in an instant messenger box. The experience is best at Renkoo’s web site, but users can communicate via Renkoo’s site itself, email, SMS or AIM, whatever they prefer. I tried it out. I had a firewall problem at the site, so used email (I did this by by going to the profile tab, selecting advanced notification preferences, and selecting “Deliver event responses to HTML email”).

The technology part is remarkable. I used Renkoo to arrange a meeting with Renkoo co-founders Joyce Park and Adam Rifkin at Prolific Oven at Palo Alto. I typed into a message box within my email, and didn’t need to go up and hit “send.” I simply hit the “respond to this invitation” tab below the message box, and Joyce and Rifkin got my messages immediately on their screen. See screenshots at bottom below (the first is of my side, using email, and the second is Joyce’s side, where she is using the Renkoo site).

After you’ve finished arranging an event, you can export it to your calendar in Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar.

As with trying out any new technology, Renkoo may take getting accustomed to. Little things, like getting in the habit of typing within the separate message box within email. Easy to do, but unexpected at first. Depending on your computer settings, including firewall, you may or may not get off to a quick start. Renkoo will be tinkering with its product going forward, and I’d like to see an easier way to see the full conversation chain through email instead of just the most recent response.

Finally, a word on Renkoo’s technology and backing: Joyce is a former lead engineer at Friendster, and a prolific coder. CEO Adam Rifkin was founder of KnowNow. Renkoo won $3 million in venture backing from big-name venture firm Matrix Partners. Matrix partner Bob Lisbonne was the VP of browser products while at Netscape. Joyce said she was impressed when he mentioned he can code in Ruby. He was also behind the move by Netscape to opensource the Mozilla browser. When she and Rifkin talked with investors, she was surprised, she said, by how few investors wanted to discuss the technology itself. Lisbonne was one of the few who did, she said.

Renkoo is a “Comet” application, which is an advancement on AJAX. It is one of three Comet commercial applications in existence, and notably, two of them are built by women (the other two are Meebo, built by Elaine Wherry, and Gtalk). You’re familiar with AJAX, popularized by Google Maps. You can scroll across those maps immediately, because the application has quietly fetched more data from Google’s server and updated your browser. Comet goes one step further, opening a persistent connection with the server as long as you stay on one page. There is a good description of Comet here.

Renkoo was built using the Dojo toolkit, backed by IBM, AOL and Sun. Other kits are Prototype and Yui.

Here is a partial screenshot of the email interface:

Here is a screenshot of the browser interface:

The round-up of crucial stuff in Silicon Valley:

Did MySpace’s Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson get shortchanged? — VentureBeat has heard that MySpace, the biggest success of the Web 2.0 wave so far, in terms of users, wasn’t such a great a hit for the co-founders. Word is, Chris DeWolfe ended up with a mere $5 million, even though the company was sold as part of Intermix for $580 million. We haven’t been able to confirm this (MySpace declined comment), but that’s a pittance, if true. The founders were watered down considerably by investors.

The Mercury News has an interview with Ross Levinsohn (pictured above), who runs News Corp’s Fox Interactive division — and who was behind the purchase of MySpace — and asks him whether the co-founders are unhappy. He responds: “There’s no indication to me that they’re unhappy.”

Levinsohn spoke at the Web 2.0 conference today, and addressed a different thorn — Brad Greenspan, the former chief executive of Myspace, who keeps suing the company on allegations it lied to its investors about its value. Levinsohn said:

He’s lost every single motion he’s charged against us. It’s like when Mike Tyson kept trying to win this fight, and the guy kept getting up …It’s kinda sad…two years before we bought the company, they kicked him out. For a guy who got $40 or 50 million from the sale, I mean…life’s too short.

(via Valleywag)

Yahoo’s acquisition binge at screeching halt? — Yahoo’s stock is in the toilet, and maybe that’s why its lost is appetite to buy companies. Check out this chart of acquisitions by the big three over the past years. Google and Microsoft are munching companies as eagerly as ever (18 between them), whereas Yahoo has acquired just one (Jumpcut), according to this chart at least.

Timebridge raises $6 million for… yet another calendar-scheduling company? — The San Francisco start-up, founded in March of last year that, lets you schedule meetings easily within your calendar. It has launched a private testing version. Chief executive Yori Nelken showed VentureBeat a demo Monday, and it has some cool features to save time organizing meetings among two or more people — like letting users block out possible meeting times, and letting their friends or contacts see the times through a central “meeting space.” When the friend selects a time, the slot is automatically booked for both people. So why all the dough? The company has invested resources into integrating various clients — it has a plugin for Outlook, for a Web version, for Blackberry/Treo, Apple, Thunderbird, Notes, etc — that it can work on whatever calendar you have. Timebridge wants to serve the busy professional, and is letting Google conquer the consumer market.

Mayfield and Norwest are the backers. More details at the site’s tour; see top-right). The basic service will be free, but revenue will could from a subscription for added security, archiving and admin features. Nelken thinks the market would accept a range of $30 to a $100 per user per year. It might also get referral fees from companies like Open Table.

Mashery lets you outsource your development — It handles the open API process for companies.

FON now the largest WiFi access network — VentureBeat caught up with Neil Rimer Wednesday, investor in FON, a company that lets people share each other’s WiFi routers. He says the service is doing well in Europe, particularly in Spain, and now has more access points globally than than any other WiFi access point network, including Boingo and T-Mobile. It was also a good move to hire Joanna Rees Gallanter for U.S. operatons, because she can apparently “talk a dog off a meat wagon,” a different skill than running a venture firm. The Madrid company also bought the popular Firefox extension, GSpace, for an undisclosed amount, GigaOm first reported. The FireFox extension allows users to treat their GMail accounts as an online file storage locker — to be launched in Feb 2007, it is essentially a FON router that will have a USB 2.0 port.

Workday’s missed opportunity — Dave Duffield, the founder of PeopleSoft may be back with new start-up Workday, but critique Jeff Nolan says it missed the opportunity to say something new. In other words, it got great media coverage because of Duffield, but it was ho-hum in the details.

Will Flock’s new chief executive turn things around? — From the beginning, Flock, which was supposed to be a social browser, failed to meet hyped expectations. It had potential, but never executed. A new chief exec, Shawn Hardin, has taken over the Mountain View company. He’s a media veteran, having worked at Yahoo, AOL Broadband and NBC. We’ve just had a sneak peak at Flock’s 1.0 browser, and it’s got some promising features — question is, can Flock convince people to make their browser their central work place or not.

Charles River Ventures STIRRs — Fresh from announcing its new attractive seed investment strategy (where it gives out $250,000 checks to promising ideas, Silicon Valley venture firm Charles River is getting submerged by entrepreneurs eager to pitch. It’s also been invited to mix with the masses — at the Nov. 15 STIRR event, a gig usually reserved for start-ups to give one-minute pitches. The Charles River gang — George Zachary, Bill Tai, and Susan Wu — will get 60 seconds to pitch the crowd. We bumped into Susan Wu today at the Web 2.0 conference; she said she was overwhelmed with dealflow.

Lightspeed Venture Partners keeps adding — Silicon Valley venture firm Lightspeed just named three new associates, Patrick Chiang, Andrew Chung and John Vrionis (as you’ll see on this page of blue shirts). This is the firm that recently saw a split, with several partners leaving to form Opus. We won’t call the Opus guys renegades, because they also like blue shirts ;)