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!