Hi Folks! As you may have seen we had some network issues this morning. By 12:30pm Pacific Time all was clear and all users were up and running. Apologies to anyone who experienced an inconvenience here – we had our support team working hard to correct the issue quickly.
Some more details – at about 2am Pacific Time we pushed a new version to production. A version with some cool new features, but more on that later. by 9am we were pretty much done with production tests – all was clear and running smoothly. At 9:30 we started noticing intermittent errors for some users. Our support team was alerted right away, and was on the case less than a minute after the problems started.
It took us about two hours to recover completely and get everybody back up and running. During this time some users could work, and some were running into system errors. We are now analyzing all logs and activities that led to the outage, and also analyzing our own response to it. We will learn not only how to minimize the chances of such an incident in the future, but also how to optimize our own response to system errors and outages in general. This is now work in progress.
While this sort of thing can happen when you’re pushing out new features and upgrading your product at the clip that we do, this morning’s outage is not something we accept, or take lighty in any way.
Again, so sorry if you were inconvenienced and we greatly appreciate your patience. For a limited time, we enabled Live Chat support (a premium feature) for all our users. Contact us or email support@timebridge.com if you run into any issue.
As a small business ourselves, we’re always looking for ways to capitalize on innovative online offerings to solve the issues we run into as we manage the clockwork of our company. Such was our inspiration for the newest expansion of our premium service, TimeBridge Business Plus. We’ve created a premium packages designed specifically for small business teams for working smarter and more economically.
With these packages, TimeBridge offers an automatically generated private virtual conference room for small businesses, allowing them to instantly schedule and connect over phone and web conferencing systems with a single click. By using TimeBridge Business Plus, companies can save nearly 70% over what they may spend on WebEx, Citrix or Adobe. TimeBridge’s robust web conferencing is flash-based for easy screen sharing with no attendee download making live web and desktop demos a smooth experience and video conferencing options ensure interactive and collaborative presentations and brainstorms.
In addition to conferencing services, the package includes our TimeBridge Groups which are just like your own mini-Exchange server in the sky – create groups inside or across companies and calendaring systems, for easy communication, scheduling and running great meetings.
We’re all back from the holidays and as we dust off our calendars, TimeBridge is rolling out some brand new features that make it even easier to meet and make meetings count. We’ve further powered up the service to include two popular tools that you’re very likely already using – today we are unveiling our integration with Evernote and a Google Gadget for your Google Calendar!
The new Evernote feature, found in the TimeBridge Meeting Room (along with the agenda, attendee information, conferencing options and our Box.net file sharing tab), enables you to:
• Store meeting notes, agendas and action items directly on Evernote,
• Keep meetings paperless and unhindered by loose notes and papers,
• Easily find and pull up previous meeting notes and collaborative text,
• Email TimeBridge notes from within Evernote notebook, and
• Organize, tag, and edit TimeBridge meeting notes from within Evernote.
Watch the video!
TimeBridge’s Google Gadget, which lives within your Google Calendar interface streamlines the scheduling process allowing you to:
• See colleagues’ real-time free/busy availability based on their calendar entries even if they are on another calendaring system, such as Outlook or Apple iCal,
• Find out which of their contacts is available or busy at any given time,
• Schedule individuals or groups,
• “Meet Right Now” with a single click, including optional conferencing services,
• Schedule a TimeBridge meeting with access to collaborative suite of tools, including agenda setting, file-sharing, conferencing and SMS options, and
• View any upcoming TimeBridge meetings, and specifically the ones that need your prompt attention right away (e.g. ones with scheduling conflicts).
These days, you’re lucky, but often pressed, to cut costs without cutting corners. In a recent New York Times article, Thomas L. Friedman discusses the idea of the Great Inflection, which is playing out in parallel with the Great Recession. The Great Inflection refers to the “low-cost, high-powered” tools, technologies and services that are emerging and inspire greater productivity and innovation.
Our new partner, Box.net, was actually mentioned in the article as a tool that one company used to cut their costs and collaborate more productively over work documents. TimeBridge, too, is part of this Great Inflection, stimulating change and adding to a movement that could mean the difference between surviving and thriving for many companies struggling to find areas to improve efficiency and creativity without expanding budgets.
Featured in Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat, Vicki Davis (aka coolcatteacher) founded the Flat Classroom Project to help teachers and students collaborate around the globe using the latest collaborative web tools. And one of the services she uses is TimeBridge. How cool is that?
The Great Inflection encompasses a lot of what Web 2.0 has been all about – doing more, better, cheaper – and it is significantly supercharged when services unite their powerful functionality to give users the ultimate tools for increased productivity and efficiency.
Where do you fit into the Great Inflection? Are you a company leveraging the newest applications and services for better efficiency? If not, it’s time to consider some changes in 2010. Either way, we’re happy to be along with you for the ride.
Since we launched our service for running great meetings earlier this fall our users provided us with a lot of great feedback. One of the most-requested features is the ability to share and collaborate on important files related to a meeting, all within TimeBridge. We searched for the best-of-breed productivity tool to answer this call.
Box.net was the clear winner to power our new file-sharing and collaboration functionality. It can now be found within our brand new Meeting Room, fully loaded with recently added Action Items and collaborative Agenda features. The Box capabilities are integrated directly into the meeting flow within TimeBridge, and our users can either quickly create a new Box account (it takes 7 seconds on average to sign up via TimeBridge), or link an existing account. Box users for their part can also create meetings right from within the box interface using OpenBox extensions. Schedule a meeting to collaborate on any file including documents, spreadsheets, presentations and images effective immediately.
Now, you can quickly navigate through tabs in TimeBridge’s new meeting room, and upload/download files:
To easily schedule a meeting from within box… enable TimeBridge on OpenBox and then click on the blue arrow to the right of the file or folder you want to collaborate on:
then select “Schedule Meeting with TimeBridge” from the dropdown, and follow the prompts:
We want TimeBridge to provide solutions for all your meeting needs and give you access to the great services and applications you’re accustomed to. This is just another way that TimeBridge, with some great help from our friends at Box.net, ensure that no stone is left unturned to aid you in preparing for and leading great meetings. We’d love to hear how it works for you, and which other great services you want to see integrated into TimeBridge in the coming weeks and months.
