tungle.blog

• RAW or Delirious

  Startups are a demanding environment.  When interviewing a candidate last week, it became apparent that he didn't know what he would be getting into.  When we were asked about what to expect, one word naturally surfaced: RAW.

  Often, people believe that startups are about long hours - burning the midnight oil.  Sometimes, working late nights and weekends are inevitable, but that's not much different from people working in consulting, private equity and fortune 1000 companies.

  People that strive in our environment are people that deliver RAW work, focused on results and do not correlate success with the number of hours spent in front of their computers.  To succeed in our environment, you need to have special traits, found in Entrepreneurs.

  • You must be able to quickly assess your priorities, constantly re-evaluate them, and do your work accordingly.
  • You must be able to clearly identify noise and not pay attention to it.
  • Do your work once - as if it's the last time you will ever see it. Chances are, you won't have time to come back to it.  Do not expect anyone to review it, and pay attention to details right from the beginning.
  • You cannot hide behind anyone or anything.  You cannot delegate.  And even though you are knee deep in delivery, you must also look at the big picture and make strategic decisions that will have a material impact on the business.

  These apply to everyone in the company, from people coding the next feature to someone negotiating the next big deal.

  Stay RAW, stay Hungry.

  July 14th, 2008 · No comments
• Are you an automation whiz? If so, come join us...

  When you're a small team tackling a massive problem (the pain of scheduling meetings, something we all feel), you have to be real smart about how you organize your work and employ tools and techniques that help a few people accomplish a lot. We're taking this principle to the next level by bringing full time QA Automation capabilities on board.

  We created a new opening today for a QA Automation Specialist to join our great team. This person will sit between our developers and our operations folks, helping us build both scalable testing environments and ultimately scalable prime time software.

  If you're interested or know someone who would be, the job description is here. But be warned, we may ask you to do push ups during the interview...

  June 17th, 2008 · No comments
• Support Kudos

  It’s not often that I feel compelled to talk about one person on the team, since everyone is so essential in building a great company. However, I have received several unsolicited emails from users commenting on the responsiveness, professionalism and knowledge of our support team.

  Although he is not much to look at (just kidding Jason - well maybe not), Jason is at the heart of those comments.  A startup has to have exceptional customer support, because every happy user will become an advocate of your product, and help spread the love.  Anyone that works in support needs to take example on Jason.  He is very responsive - responding often at any time of the day and night - cares about our users, and promptly communicates with the team the positive and negative feedback we receive in the field.  This helps us quickly address known issues and plan-out features that you are requesting.

  Thank you Jason.

  June 13th, 2008 · No comments
• A great feature for headhunters

  Don't you hate it that in Outlook, you can never easily organize a meeting without taking part in it? For headhunters and admin assistants, this is a real pain. Tungle allow you to do that AND, help you broker a meeting between two or more parties. It is easy... all you need to do is choose the "not attending" option when creating a space and that's it. You will know when the meeting is booked but will never clutter your calendar. Only you as the meeting organizer needs to download Tungle - meeting invitees are only required to use a browser.

  Organizing a meeting for someone else is easy. Try if for yourself, download tungle: hhttp://www.tungle.com/Home/svc/Download

  June 3rd, 2008 · No comments
• Welcome iPhone users

  Last week, we announced our support for Blackberry users. This was our 1st step towards enabling busy, mobile users to seamlessly schedule their meetings.

  Today, we are announcing support for the iPhone. You can read about it here.

  So, if you are an iPhone / Mac user how can you use Tungle? If you are scheduling meetings, today you need to be on Outlook. However, we will soon support iCal and Entourage. If you are receiving a meeting invite from someone using Tungle, you can book that meeting either from your desktop or from your iPhone and have it show up in your iPhone, iCal, or Entourage calendar.

  Give it a try and let us know what you think.

  May 27th, 2008 · No comments
• Corporate Facelift

  As part of our continued efforts to improve our service, we made minor updates to our corporate website.

  We made the following improvements:

  1. We first highlighted the top two functions of our service: (1) easily share your calendar, and (2) coordinate meetings with anyone.
  2. We replaced our video on the homepage with a shorter one, with more screenshots of our service.
  3. We added a quick reference to our latest blog posts, and to our coverage section – BTW, you should check out this article that appeared last week in the Financial Times.
  4. We updated the “What’s Tungle” section with a few more short videos on how to use Tungle.
  5. Finally, we moved the link to the "Help" section to the upper menu bar, because there is a lot of valuable information that can be found there, including a complete set graphical user guides, FAQs, and videos.

  We hope that these minor tweaks will help you get a better feel for our service – and see how addictive Tungle can become.

  May 26th, 2008 · No comments
• A good week

  So, we're gearing down here at Tungle HQ and getting ready for the weekend. It's been a busy and good week.

  We announced our support for Blackberry users at the beginning of the week. If you receive a Tungle space from someone, you can now respond to it and book the meeting on the go from your Blackberry.

  That news was well received in the market. Check out our coverage section for a sample of the press we received.

  Also, today, Skype Journal posted on us. We were really excited by this post. Thanks to Jim @ Skypejournal for the kind words.

  We welcomed a bunch of new users to our service. Great to see.

  Lots of other stuff going on here this week. Stay tuned and have a good weekend!

  May 23rd, 2008 · No comments
• On the move with the BlackBerry

  As of today, Tungle users can easily coordinate meetings with people that have a BlackBerry. Our full Press Release can be found here.

  This is an important part of helping our users coordinate meetings easily and efficiently. Now, they don’t have to wait for people to be in front of their computer to respond to a Tungle meeting invitation. People on the move, can check their email on their BlackBerry, click on the link, and voila, they are brought to a simple page, formatted for their device. Beautiful.

  This is just one more step to make meeting coordination fast and easy. Try it!

  May 20th, 2008 · No comments
• 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