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.