A 22-year-old currency trader is selling his grandparents’ house for as many Bitcoins as he can get his hands on.

Taylor More put the listing up for the family home (pictured above) in Alberta, Canada, several days ago. He told me that the property is worth about $395,000, according to a realtor appraisal.

“This is a good way to get in on the movement early,” he told me. “It’s the best way I could think of to get as many bitcoins as possible.” More is so passionate about the cyber currency that he is willing to negotiate or accept a partial payment.

Bitcoin is a cryptographically secure currency that operates without a central authority, unlike the dollar or yen. It is a favorite of the libertarian and hipster crowd, but it has gained some legitimacy, with sites WordPress.com offering updates in exchange for Bitcoins.

More has yet to receive any offers for the quaint 2-bedroom bungalow that sits on 2.9 acres and boasts mountain views. The problem is that only a handful of people have collected enough Bitcoins needed (between 5,500 and 7,000 depending on the highly fluctuating value) to purchase a house.

More claims this is the first time anyone has sold a house in exchange for Bitcoins.

He hopes to make a profit from the transaction in the short term. Stories of cybercurrency traders making real money by trading Bitcoins are increasingly common.

For this reason, coupled with the fact that there is no centralized authority, it’s considered by some to be the most dangerous project on the Internet.

More’s convinced that Bitcoin will be appealing, given the banking crisis in Europe. He references recent news that one of Cyprus’s largest banks is freezing ATM withdrawals.

He is also hoping the house sale will lure some of Bitcoin’s early adopters. The would-be entrepreneur is working on a project that involves “needing a lot of Bitcoins,” but More would not disclose any further details.

Tradehill cofounders Ryan Singer and Jered Kenna (L-R)

Bitcoin evangelists say that More isn’t crazy — and that the house sale is a strategic move for any financier.

Jered Kenna is one of the early proponents of the Bitcoin craze. Kenna announced this week that he would be relaunching TradeHill, a site that was one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges, but was shut down after being embroiled in a string of payments fraud charges.

Kenna said if the house sells, it would be an important milestone. “There are people who would buy it for bragging rights alone,” he said.

He continued, “In June of 2011, I called Bitcoin an experiment during an interview with the NY Observer and advised not to bet the house. Had he sold his house for Bitcoin then it would be worth $1.6 million today.”

Tradehill COO Ryan Singer advised that More should still use the normal broker approach to negotiating and documenting the transaction, as Bitcoin is just a settlement mechanism.

As for the grandparents in question, More told me they have recovered from the shock and are moving east to be closer to him. More’s father, a professional hockey player, owns the house and would be financially responsible if the bet doesn’t pay off.

“My family knows it’s for sale, but I’m going to give it some time before I throw this Bitcoin idea on them,” said More.

For more information, check out the house listing here.

It figures. As soon as I learn to love Google Calendar’s appointment slots feature, the company decides it is a “less-popular feature” and discontinues it.

Calendar appointment slots are one of a slew of features that Google is sunsetting today, as part of its “winter cleaning” of less-used or less-than-successful features. Among those features was Punchd, which Google paid $10 million to acquire a little more than a year ago.

Appointment slots was a handy feature that let you set up blocks of time when people could reserve appointments with you — like office hours. It was a little hard to figure out, however, and Google’s user interface didn’t make it any easier to navigate. Plus, it was buried: it always took me five or ten minutes to figure out where to click in order to get to it. So it’s probably no surprise that it’s now gone. (Technically, you can still create appointment slots until Jan. 4, and any slots you’ve created before then will remain open for a year after that.)

Also gone as of Jan. 4: Calendar syncing through Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync. “With the recent launch of CardDAV, Google now offers similar access via IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV, making it possible to build a seamless sync experience using open protocols,” Google wrote on its blog.

Also, it might have added: Screw you, Microsoft.

Google is also ending a few other sync tools: Google Calendar Sync (another ActiveSync-based tool), sync for Symbian S60, and SyncML support.

The company is also discontinuing Punchd, an app that lets you keep your loyalty cards on a smartphone. Google acquired Punchd for a reported $10 million in July, 2011. Punchd will be removed from the Google Play store on June 7, 2013. This leaves Google without a way to help you keep track of how many free lattes you have earned at the local coffee shop, but it might add loyalty card support to Google Wallet in the future.

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.