tungle.blog

• Friday Funny

  This is a section of a job posting with the Government of Canada. A family member sent it my way – thinking I would get a kick out of it. I did. Read it, it gets better with every word (suffice to say - candidates that apply for this are not Tungle material).

  If you don't believe me, here is the full job description.
  

  WORKING CONDITIONS

  1. Physical Effort

  Long periods of sitting when working on the computer or chairing or attending meetings. There may be some walking between buildings to attend meetings.

  2. Physical Environment

  Located in a comfortable work area, with daily exposure to glare from computers and eye focus during long periods of extensive reading. Natural light may not be available.

  3. Sensory Attention

  There is a requirement for periods of prolonged concentration when using a personal computer, writing and reviewing policy proposals and other documents and conducting research and analysis where attention to detail is paramount. The incumbent must pay close and constant visual attention when proofreading documents. The Senior Policy and Project Officer must maintain focused aural and visual attention when leading or participating in committees and meetings and be aware of the changing stimuli such as reactions, inaccuracies in the transmission and understanding of information among all parties, vested interest of some participants that are counter to achieving consensus, etc., in order to identify and successfully deal with these factors.

  4. Mental Stress

  Stress is constant and results from: responding to requests from senior management, working groups, clients and other stakeholders/partners; adherence to tight deadlines and last-minute changes; providing advice and taking action on complex requests on a wide variety of issues in short time frames; balancing multiple or conflicting demands, and negotiating time frames and  deliverables. Mental stress is also experienced when attending meetings held under strained  circumstances when there is the need to achieve agreement in the face of considerable resistance. The need for the highest quality of service delivery also adds to the mental stress.

  May 16th, 2008 · No comments
• Tungle Feedback

  As part of our ongoing efforts to improve Tungle, we randomly ping some of our users every now and then and ask them to give us their experience using our product. 

  While reaching out to one such user, we got the following feedback:

     "so far, it's okay. Some of it seems pretty useless, though, like the number of emails received from a contact that shows up in that little winamp graph thing. Mildly interesting, but not useful and takes a lot of space. What would be more useful there would be contact
  information--company name, location, job title. I'm undecided on the photo thing. It would be good in a company setting, but I don't have photos of my business contacts, so it's wasted space, and you can't turn it off. And what is the difference between whatever the view is that is the default and the profile view? Other than having the orange bar with the name of the contact retained when you go into the conversation?"

  As you may have noticed, the comments have nothing to do with Tungle. This is why I always get paranoid and make sure I'm sending emails to the right people before pressing that "send" button. But with the amount of emails, IMs, twitter feeds, etc., this scenario is bound to happen to anybody. Our user in question had good intentions but unfortunately our brains can only deal with so much.

  But please, don't let this stop you from talking to us. Go ahead and send us your feedback and start a conversation. If it's not related to Tungle, we'll try our best to route it to the people responsible.

  P.S. Note to Jeff Bonforte. The user above is most probably referring to Xobni. :)

  May 14th, 2008 · No comments
• The BlackBerry Partners Fund Challenge

  When Rick called me up late Thursday night, he had a challenge for us. They were announcing today (May 12th) the creation of a new venture fund called The BlackBerry Partners Fund at the WES conference in Orlando.  A $150 million fund, co-manged by JLA (Tungle's very own VC) and RBC Venture Partners, dedicated to the  mobile space.  Exciting times for the Canadian venture market.

  His challenge: "We need a webpage where people (media, companies) will be able to book 15 minutes briefings with our newly created venture fund"

  Me: "You know we don't do exactly that right?"

  Rick: "Yup, and I forgot to mention, each time slots needs to be available twice, because we have two meeting rooms, and we need to have it for Monday morning".

  After laughing for a few minutes - having flashbacks to my Chapters.ca days, when Rick would call me up late at night - we took on the challenge.  Figured it was a good way to test the flexibility of our platform, not to mention put some spice in our lives.

  After some quick visual mockups, Fang, Vitaliy and Alfred worked their magic.

  Here's a screenshot of the result.  A simple user interface that allows anyone to book briefing sessions with the new fund.   People that want a meeting go to a specific URL, enter their name, email address and pick a time slot.  Our Dynamic Availability engine eliminates time slots as meetings get booked.  An email confirmation is sent to the person that booked the meeting, in the proper format for their calendar solution: Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, Lotus, etc.

  On the go, do it all from your BlackBerry...

  Moral of the story: if you have specific ideas of how you would like to have your scheduling problems addressed, let us know, we have a flexible platform (and a great team) that allows us to build a solution that will suit your needs.  The more people tell us what they want, the faster it will make it on our roadmap.

  P.S. Congrats to the RBC Partners Fund and the JLA Ventures team for this new fund.  Great work.

  May 12th, 2008 · No comments
• It's Time to Share!

  It's been two weeks since we launched Tungle and already, we are seeing some interesting trends.  We are glad to see small groups of five or six users within one company signing up to use Tungle to share free/busy calendar data.  This is great news as we believe in Dynamic Availability (http://blog.tungle.com/tungleblog/2008/04/we-are-live.html)- and real-time calendar sharing between trusted colleagues is an important component in solving the meeting coordination pain.

  

  If you haven't tried it yet, here's how easy it is to use Tungle to share calendars with anyone, inside or outside your company environment:

  1. Find the user in your contact list.  You can use the filter box to quickly find him/her.
  2. Mouse over the name, and a share button will appear.  Click on it.
  3. On the popup, you can ask your contact to share his/her free/busy calendar with you and you can decide whether you want to share your calendar with him/her.  You can have different sharing combination for each of your contacts.

  You are done.  If your contact already has Tungle installed   they will get a popup with your sharing request.  If the user is not a Tungle user, then they will get a nice email from you, inviting them to get Tungle.  Once they are sharing, the icon next to their name will turn purple and instantly, you will be able to see their free/busy.
  
  Try it, it's easy, and it works.  Let me know how you like it.
  
  P.S. If you are already using Microsoft Exchange to share calendars within your enterprise, Tungle will act as your personal Exchange outside the office.  Tungle is fully compatible with Exchange and enables you to share calendars with partners or friends outside of your company.

  May 5th, 2008 · No comments
• Name That Competitor

  Knowing the monsters you are competing against is fundamental in building a Great company. I remember a while back, I was attending a conference and the Product Manager in charge of Google Calendar commented on his competitors. Everyone in the room immediately thought of Microsoft – he surprised us when he took out a piece of paper and said: “This is my competitor, although there might be over 300 million electronic calendar users out there, there are billions using paper calendars.”

  Many in the room missed the point he was trying to make – I am sure he was following MS’ every move, and was trying to build a product that would take away some market share from them, but - his point was that he was trying to build a product that would not only convert users away from MS, but also got paper abiding folks to start using an electronic calendar.

  There is a lot of noise in our market and there are several small players popping-up here and there. At the end of the day, no one has even come close to winning the meeting coordination challenge. But I can tell you that at Tungle, we have our eye on the biggest competitor of all: status quo. Good old email and phone calls. We will only be successful if we manage to be easier, pervasive, efficient and fun. Game on!

  May 1st, 2008 · No comments
• Tech Leadership Conference

  If you're in the Kitchener/Waterloo region tomorrow (Thursday, May 1st) come and see us at the Tech Leadership Conference in Kitchener/Waterloo.

  This conference is one of Canada's largest tech business conferences, more than 400 Waterloo Region tech professionals will converge to attend it.

  Rod and Fang will be manning our table and will be ready to get you hooked on Tungle.

  Other exhibitors this year are AideRSS, LoyaltyMatch, Semacode, Tungle, Well.ca, Smartpatterns, Something On, Client Outlook, Aeryon Labs, Ghoti Studios, T-Ray Science, and FOSS Factory.

  April 30th, 2008 · No comments
• Always Be Closing

  Today, we announced that Rod Weir and Mark MacLeod joined our small team of hard working and dedicated individuals – which brings our count to 13.

  The press release can be found here: http://www.tungle.com/Home/svc/Press

  Both Rod and Mark have the right attitude and a desire to build a great company – not to mention experience to boot.

  Rod and I worked together at Nimcat – where he was our Global Sales Director. Rod joins our team as VP of Business Development and Sales. One of Rod’s key skills is his ability to herd cats – if you worked in BD or Sales, you know that this is probably the most important skill needed to close deals.

  Some of you may already know Mark MacLeod from his well read blog startupcfo.ca.  What you may not know is that Mark is much more than a CFO - he is an operational, no-nonsense, get it done kind of guy. His role and contribution goes well beyond spreadsheets and cash flow management. He gets his hands dirty in operations, sales, marketing, you name it – whatever it takes to get the job done. He even agreed to wear a kilt when we hit 100,000 users.

  ABC (Always Be Closing) – words to live by.

  April 29th, 2008 · No comments
• Tungle on Facebook

  Dear Tunglers,

  If you to love to Tungle come join us on our Facebook page. We'll keep you updated on what's happening with us and show you how to get the most from our great scheduling solution.

  Hope to see you on Facebook

  April 24th, 2008 · No comments
• Hiring again

  We are hiring again. We have two openings in our R & D team. Check out the careers page for more info.

  One word of caution: If your name is Mark (or Marc), you will need to be really good to get in. We already have 3 people with the same name. 
  

  Come join us...

  April 24th, 2008 · No comments
• Come see us at the Web 2.0 Expo Unconference

  If you're in the San Francisco area this week, come meet Tungle CEO Marc Gingras at the Web 2.0 Open Unconference.

  What is an unconference you ask? It's a conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants. The event is packed so it promises to be a great session.

  We hope to see you there.

  April 22nd, 2008 · No comments