by Baruch on May 23, 2008
You might have noticed that we’re hiring here at TimeBridge – check out our careers page! To help us fill these positions, I have engaged a couple of recruiters. The scheduling process to interview candidates has always been a pain, especially with multiple candidates for multiple openings, but TimeBridge has enabled us to make it extremely simple. After I review the resumes from the recruiters, the next step is often a phone screen. All the recruiter has to do is look at my personal availability link, give the candidate a choice of times when I’m available, and shoot me back an email to confirm. No back and forth, no long email negotiation to find a time that works for both of us – it’s great!
If you have a situation where our service has simplified your life, post a comment to our blog – we’d love to hear how you’re using TimeBridge!
P.S. – if you’re interested in one of these positions, shoot us a resume at jobs@timebridge.com.
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by John Stormer on January 10, 2008
Happy New Year! If you found returning to your office after a little R&R over the holiday season a bit hectic, we understand. Now that 2008 is here it seems like there are even more goals to meet, projects to kick-off, and friends to catch up with. Life is getting chaotic again!
If you’re looking for ways to get more done in ’08, join our webcast this Friday to lean how TimeBridge can help save you time. This 30-minute “TimeBridge 101” webcast will quickly teach you how to:
* Save time with one-step scheduling by eliminating the e-mail back-and-forth associated with getting busy people together
* Integrate TimeBridge with your existing Outlook or Google Calendar
* Exchange your calendar availability across companies and calendaring systems
* Save time scheduling both large and small meetings
* Use tips and tricks that will make scheduling faster and easier
It’s the perfect way to learn about TimeBridge. Hope you can join us! Space is limited so click here to register now.
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by Yori Nelken on August 5, 2007
There is always so much to do in a start-up, but never enough hands, time or other resources. We’ve absorbed a lot of feedback from our users and have been quietly, but busily, building a new version of TimeBridge. But as we gear up for the next phase of our business it’s clear we need more help.
I am thrilled to have Ellen Salisbury joining us as VP Engineering and Operations. Her experience throughout the stack of complex systems, and her specific experience most recently as VP Product and Services at Stata Labs then Director of Yahoo Research Berkeley makes her a perfect match for us.
Stay tuned for many great things……… soon!
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by Yori Nelken on June 20, 2006
I am at the Collaborative Technology Conference (CTC 2006) in Boston (where the temprature is now 
) – pretty interesting crowd in here. I was speaking on a panel organized by Michael Sampson previously one of the best collaboration bloggers out there www.shared-spaces.com [rip] and now with Foldera [good luck, Michael!])- and moderated by Larry Cannell from Ford titled “Calendaring: Time for an Update”.
Below are some of the main points made by the panelists, who, as a group, mostly focused on free/busy and other type of calendar sharing and organization.
Larry Cannell started by making the point that calendars manage our most important resource – time, and went on to argue that scheduling is still an art.
Next, I argued, in a slightly contrarian way, that free/busy as a scheduling tool is inherently flawed, because whether I am “free” or “busy” is, interestingly enough, probably the least important bit of information to my decision process. Instead, it is information contained in the proposal itself (who is asking? what is it about?) and the group dynamics (who else is going to be there?) that dominates a participant’s decision-making.
My main points were:
1. Calendars are not natural scheduling tool, because:
- The Propose/Accept/Reject model is flawed
- Free/busy access is inherently broken, in most situations
2. Any solution must:
- Start with the way people communicate (email, be polite, etc.)
- Capture group dynamics & support good citizenship
- Be easy & efficient
Consistent with my view that TimeBridge is a new way to interact with existing calendars, and there is no new need for “YAC” (“Yet Another Calendar” – as Fran from Airena said, if my notes are correct).
Later, Nathaniel Borenstein from IBM agreed that calendaring is a very hard problem, and suggested we start by asking the most basic questions:
- What is time? How can we structure it?
- How can one control the experience? With what tools?
Later, Nathaniel made the point that having standards, while very complex, will go a long way towards solving the problem, and pleaded the relevant organizations to take action. He made the point that IBM heard that the #1 (and 2, 3, 4 & 5) priority in terms of calendaring in large corporations is free/busy sharing.
Following that, John Robb of Zimbra described the commonly held view that calendars are disconnected islands of data. No sharing of free/busy of information, no ability to mesh-up, most are not shareable and lack universal access (such as from mobile devices). He basically argued (against IBM & Microsoft, I guess) that since the current off-line calendars were invented there were “few” advances in standards and technology. e.g. the World Wide Web emerged, XML was defined, Web 2.0 came into existence, search is omnipresent, Macs made a come back and open source is a respected way to get IT projects done.
What is coming? He mentioned initiating conference calls straight out of the calendars, integration with travel sites, overlay calendars with web analytics etc.
Gary Schwartz, representing Calconnect, provided an entertaining and candid overview of the history of standards and the current efforts underway.
The session ended with Fran Rabuck from Airena suggesting “if time is money, then your calendar is your wallet”.
I later added – if your calendar is your wallet, then TimeBridge is PayPal 
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by Mark Drummond on April 28, 2006
I’ve worked in a variety of places, including NASA, various consulting firms, and three startups.
One constant element of my working experience is that the basic ’stuff’ of business — coordinating activities with other people — is a phenomenal pain. It’s like an overall frictional force on business execution. Kind of like swimming in syrup rather than water (although it seems that that particular metaphor is now busted; see the April 2004 article in Nature).
Since I never metaphor I didn’t like, how about this one: scheduling activities, meetings, etc., involves an asymmetrical energy event. It’s like poking an elephant with a pin. Small amount of energy out, a large amount of energy back. An example: I send a single email message to seven people, trying to schedule a product design review meeting. Three days and 47 email messages later, we’ve finally settled on a time to meet. A small amount of energy out, and a complete emailstrom of well-intended but largely ineffectual communication back.
In 1997, I built a Perl-based prototype of a web-based group scheduling service. I called this “EventMesh”, thinking that if the Internet was about linking computers, and if the Web was about linking documents, then this new group scheduling thing I’d built was about linking events. An event, I figured, could be represented and exist even if it didn’t have a precise start time.
In fact, the underlying idea in EventMesh was that it would be best if each event could collect constraints on when various people considered themselves available for it. This way, for some specific event, I could say that I’m available any afternoon next week, you could say that you’re not available Monday or Friday, and this leaves us with the open window of the afternoons of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Using such a process, we narrow down to an acceptable start time, rather than playing a calendar-based version of battleship: I ask, “How about Friday next week, at 2PM?”, and you answer “Hah hah! No! Try again!”. Unless you’re desperate for a strange form of entertainment, calendrical battleship really isn’t much fun.
This idea of per-event constraint collection and manipulation came from looking at the profound limitations of existing group scheduling systems. After building the EventMesh prototype, I wrote a short whitepaper on the problems that I saw with existing systems. If there’s any interest, I’ll take that old whitepaper and make it available via this blog.
So EventMesh was an implementation of the per-event constraint-collection idea. It sent SMTP-based email to people to request their per-event availability information, and used HTML over HTTP to display and collect it. The idea worked pretty well, and after demos to both Institutional Venture Partners and Mayfield, I managed to raise a Series A venture investment, and to create a core team. The company that we founded became known (and loved by many!) as Timedance. Timedance grew to the point where (according to independent evaluator PC Data), it was supporting over 1M monthly visitors.
When I next get a few minutes to add to this blog, I’ll explain some of the lessons that I learned at Timedance, what worked and what didn’t work in terms of user experience, and some general principles that I’ve discovered that apply when one tries to add “computational value” to communication flows that are inherently very personal and loosely structured.
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