Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Herding Cats, Part 2

January 20 2010

We promised feedback after week of trying out three similar mtg/event scheduling tools. To recap, we are playing around with Presdo, Tungle and TimeBridge. For our purposes TimeBridge came out on top. IĀ encourage you to run out and try each of these apps and feel free to come back here with comments.

TimeBridge

Pro: Scheduling meetings with several busy people without haggling is our biggest pain point. Problem solved. The user interface was straight forward. Trial account left open the possibility of a cross sell to other features. (We are entrepreneurs, too. Nice to see good pricing strategy.)

Con: Sharing calendars left users confused. Most found it difficult to find the colleagues shared calendar. In the end, that’s not very useful as it makes better sense to send an invite out that fills holes in your own calendar.

Presdo

Pro: Easy to use. Super easy. That bulldog that rides a skateboard could use it. Sign up is easy, so it took no time at all to get going.

Con: Not sure how this trumps iCal or Outlook when scheduling events for your calendar. It seems like an extra step, though I understand the argument for Presdo meeting reminders in advance, which is better than most calendar apps. No collaborative scheduling. Outbound only scheduling, which make it more like a nice scheduling to-do list.

Tungle

Pro: Handles collaborative scheduling with ease. Remember, that’s our biggest pain point. UI is intuitive once you get past the early handholding. Seems this app was intended for perhaps a less web-savvy users–Wall Street v. One Dell Way. Short URL can be copy and pasted into your own email client quickly and easily. That’s an interesting feature for contacts not interested in third-party mail, or leerily of it.

Con: Some of the sharing UI is tough to navigate. It’s just me, but loads of white and purple on the page make navigation visually distracting.

Conclusion

It’s a tie (for now). We’ll continue to run Tungle against TimeBridge and vice versa until we settle on an app. Time to kick the tires when it matters–with clients. Sorry, Presdo. Nifty little app, but didn’t have enough muscle as a business tool.

Tungle
Tagline: Scheduling made easy

TimeBridge
Tagline: Run great meetings

Presdo
Tagline: Make time to “___”.

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GizaPage Social Networking

May 21 2009

GizaPage is a social network organizer that helps manage personal and corporate brands under one roof. The idea is ambitious, but if you’re like me it just might be a cure for the five tabs I have open in Firefox right now to run through the latest news about what Matt had for breakfast, what my wife and daughter are doing today, and the latest on the direct marketing front. Basically you’re consolidating all your online profiles.

A redundant solutions for all but the person using 15 or more social networking platforms.

A redundant solutions for all but the person using 15 or more social networking platform.

Signing up is easy. You create a personalized URL as your single-source destination and click the activation link. The first thing GizaPage asks you to do is import contact from one Gmail, Yahoo, LinkedIn, or similar CRM-like applications. I’m a little hestitnat to start handing out my user name and password, but you can get around this by pulling the contacts in from one of the above then changing your password. Kind of a pain, but a necessary step regardless of their promise not to keep your info on file.

Once you get past that screen the app has you add your public profiles from basically any and all social networking sites on the web. I just went with my top five, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, and Flickr. Click next, copy and past your personalized URL in your browser and hit go.

My personalized homepage was as advertised with five tabs across the top. I clicked the Twitter tab and was surprised to see not my homepage, but my homepage displayed in TwitterTree. The Twitter app is not a total waste. It expands are trimmed URLs so you have a little more information before clicking through. It’s not better or worse, just different. The other four tabs are predictable and diaplay your profile homepages for Facebook, LiinkedIn, Delicious and Flickr. No changes here.

Why should you spend time signing up for GizaPage? You shouldn’t. Your time would be better spend reading our blog, updating your status and tweeting not creating a redundant social networking site with yet another domain and another password to bookmark and remember.

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