First, let me say that the experience I’m about to describe will not stop me from using the apps I mention. However, I found some weak spots that put me in a jam, and thought I’d share to help you avoid the same situation.

Where TimeDriver Falls Short

I’ve been singing the praises of TimeDriver, the personal appointment scheduler, because I love the way it lets me break my calendar into smaller chunks — or “Books” — and share them with groups of people who I want to see specific open time blocks on my schedule. I have a Book for my phone demos for WebWorkerDaily, one for my women in business podcast, another for my Second Life podcast, and then I set up one specifically for in-person interviews at SXSW.

What I learned the day I arrived here is that TimeDriver doesn’t translate to a third time zone, meaning that I saw the calendar as Alaska Time (where I live and work), every interviewee saw the scheduler in their time zone, and then we both arrived in Austin, which is in Central Time, we both got the meeting times wrong. The way I found out about this snafu? Missing a long overdue meeting with C.C. Chapman, a colleague and friend. Because of the time zone issue, our meeting actually coincided with my flight into Austin. There was very little I could do to rectify the situation from the air.

When I finally did get TimeDriver tech support on the phone (note: they are excellent and patient), the only solution they could offer was a workaround. Basically I should have switched my computer to Central Time before setting up the schedule Book, then reverted back to my time zone. Then the Book would be in the wrong time slots for Alaska and for the interviewee, but the correct ones for Texas. But then I would have to inform the interviewees (of which there are over a dozen) that they have to note the timezone discrepancy and make adjustments accordingly. Yikes.

Until TimeDriver adds the capability of an alternate “common” time zone for when meeting parties are traveling to meet in a time zone other than their own, you’re going to get very messed up using its scheduling Books.

The Quick Workaround With Meetwith.me

In a panic, I spent my night going through TimeBridge‘s new scheduling solution Meetwith.me (which I recently reviewed) to see if it could be an alternative solution to my appointment dilemma. Unlike TimeDriver’s Books, TimeBridge doesn’t let you designate different time chunks from your calendar for different audiences. However, I figured out that I could sign up again to claim a second Meetwith.me page using a different email address, and then narrow my time availability to just certain blocks of time during my stay at SXSW.

I was able to then send out invites, get responses back and manage the first wave of responses to nail down times. But later, I realized that after the first wave of responses, more had arrived and since I was using a secondary email address, I didn’t see them and missed a number of interview opportunities. Luckily, some persistent PR folks tracked down my primary email and were able to make contact with me through other channels.

In the course of stressing over my scheduling apps dilemma, I ran into Mark Gingras, the CEO of Tungle, another scheduling app. I told him what I was going through and then scolded him. Why? Because when I tried signing up for Tungle.me to see if it might be a good interim solution, I could not access my newly-opened account. We discussed the third time zone issue, and Gingras admitted that Tungle.me did not have a specific solution for it, but he said it was a much-requested feature and hinted at integrating in the future.

It just goes to show that SXSW can test applications to near-breaking, but also provide unprecedented access to heads of application firms who can troubleshoot for you in-person and on the fly!

How do you manage scheduling in multiple time zones with two or more people and with calendar integration?

For the GigaOM network’s complete SXSW coverage, check out this round-up.

Some people have personal assistants scheduling their days. I use a combination of TimeDriver and TimeBridge right now. With TimeDriver, the online personal appointment scheduler, I can create Schedule Books, which are effectively discrete “mini calendars,” or carefully selected portions of my full workday calendar, that I assign to a given type of meeting or call.

For example, if you want to schedule a demo for me to review your application for WebWorkerDaily, you could use my Product Demos link. If you wanted to schedule a half-hour meeting with me at South by Southwest this March to demo your product or be interviewed by me, then you’d use this link. I also have a “let’s Hang Out at SXSW” Schedule Book for friends I want to make sure I see while I’m there. And I have a Schedule Book for my new women’s business podcast to record phone interviews. Each link reveals a discrete number of time slots, and my availability is dependent on my actual Google Calendar availabilities, so if I end up booking time with a client, it automatically removes those time options from TimeDriver’s Schedule Books.

TimeDriver notifies me by email about any schedule additions and inserts them into my Google Calendar. So far, it has been working wonders for me because I don’t have to go back and forth over and over to find a compatible time with people who want to meet with me, and I can designate specific days of the week and specific hours of the day to, say, demos or recorded phone interviews.

I recently reviewed TimeBridge’s Meetwith.me app, and I immediately saw a gap in my scheduling solutions: I wanted to be able to give certain people full access to my calendar to schedule something with me, but didn’t want to share my Google Calendar with them because they just don’t need that much information on a consistent basis. I also really liked the elegance of this calendar-sharing application. TimeDriver still feels like a bit clunky on the interface but the utility is good.

Since I reviewed Meetwith.me, I’ve already had three meetings scheduled through it, and there’s nothing about it I don’t like so far. However, I found that on the side of the person who wants to schedule times it’s not as easy to use as it could be. For example, one person scheduled an hour time slot even though we both knew the call would be half an hour. It just wasn’t clear to them as a new user how to specify a shorter time block.

As my time is more and more in demand for my business and more and more in demand for my home life (three-year-old, husband), I find that I need a work/life manager. While I’ve been working with a personal assistant, right now I’m still not comfortable using an assistant to handle my scheduling. I still appreciate the more personal touch, and even though using TimeDriver and TimeBridge can be a little geeky, I think it gives people the impressions that a) I’m very busy, and my time is at a premium; and b) I care enough to connect with them that I’ll put them in control of the scheduling so we can find something that works for us both.

Am I wrong about opening these “controlled” and secure calendaring options to others? And shouldn’t I be limiting the number of calls or meetings I have a day? Because I sure do feel overloaded. Maybe I am making myself too accessible. Last year, I was only able to carve out a 4-6 hour workday and could never get anything done. This year, I’ve rearranged a few things, spent a little more money on daycare, and have eked out almost a 7-hour workday, and yet I still find I don’t have enough time in the day. I don’t want to expand my workday hours any further yet still want to be productive. All these calls and meetings getting on my calendar are becoming a burden. And that doesn’t sound like a good thing to me.

So what do you think? How accessible is too accessible? And how do you handle your accessibility?

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The new feature provides users with a page where they can publicize the times that they are available for meetings. Visitors to the page can then use the interface to propose meeting times. Here’s mine as an example.

One handy feature that I liked was that I was able to limit meetings to “business hours” based on my timezone so I wouldn’t get meetings scheduled at 9am EST or 5am Alaska time. You can set your calendar limitations under “My Settings/Account Settings.”

Your Meetwith.me page is public; one thing I couldn’t find was a way to make it private, and only allow access to the people I have invited. Given my very crammed days, I’m a little hesitant to open up the entire calendar like this; however, I could always block certain days and really narrow down my available “business hours.”

To test out the new Meetwith.me feature, I sent out invitations to access my calendar to several people with whom I’ve been trying to coordinate a meeting. If they share their calendars with me via TimeBridge, then we can easily find compatible meeting times across all time zones.

TimeBridge is hoping that once you confirm meetings, you’ll up your subscription to take full advantage of its “Plus” features, including  enhanced “meeting rooms” with free teleconferencing and premium web conferencing that rivals WebEx and the like (it licenses DimDim’s software, which I find to be pretty good). The idea is to bring all elements of your meeting management into one place, including a collaborative agenda, shared files, meeting notes and action items.

Another New Feature: The LinkedIn Widget

TimeBridge has also added another new feature that adds some important flavor to your meetings, especially ones with people whom you don’t know very well. In your enhanced meeting room, you will now see the LinkedIn profiles of other meeting attendees if they are subscribers to TimeBridge and are also on LinkedIn. The company says that a majority of people using TimeBridge are also on LinkedIn.

The LinkedIn widget lets you pop up key relevant information about each meeting attendee, such as their current occupation and educational background. Besides being useful business intelligence at your fingertips, it is also can provide good icebreaking fodder when speaking with someone new.

What are you using to schedule and manage your meetings?

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1. Shoeboxed. Organize your receipts and business cards through this service (see our review here). With the web app, you scan in what you want to save and organize or mail in your “shoebox” of items to scan and let Shoeboxed do it for you. The results are searchable and easy to organize. With the iPhone app, you can take a photo to digitize a receipt or card.
2. Evernote. The Evernote browser bookmarklet makes it easy to save all or portions of a web page to categorize content and images (see our review here). The Evenote iPhone app lets you do the same with a snap of your iPhone camera, create notes and record audio memos.
3. Bento. If you’re using the personal FileMaker Pro application (see our review here), you might want to try the iPhone app which can operate as a standalone app or sync with your desktop version. You can get mobile access to your Bento libraries and collections, create new records, edit details, sort data, and modify forms.
4. Freshbooks. If you’re looking for easy invoicing, Freshbooks is a great solution (see our coverage of the app here). You can use the MiniBooks app to sync with your Freshbooks account and manage invoices, time, and other related functionality.
5. Task2Gather. Gather, manage and share your tasks, subtasks and projects for yourself and your team (see our review here). Sync the iPhone app with the free Task2Gather desktop application and manage tasks on the go.
6. SugarSync. Work in the cloud, collaborate, back up and sync important documents across all platforms and key devices with this pervasive application (see our review here). View and share files on your iPhone to keep the work flowing, even if you’re not near your computer.
7. TimeBridge.While TimeBridge sets out to be your meeting and conference call one-stop solution (see our review here), the iPhone app gives you control of your meetings while you’re traveling. Call in and handle business on the go.

And a little something extra: Starbucks has not one but two iPhone apps, so you can find the Starbucks nearest you and even build a perfect drink that you can share with friends. Then use your iPhone and the Starbucks Card Mobile to pay for your java (in selected stores) and manage your account. I’ll take my cuppa joe with extra cream, please.

What is your favorite web application with a companion iPhone app, and why?

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The TimeBridge scheduler lets you set up a meeting or conference call by prompting you to pick some ideal date and time options, then sends them to the participants to vote on their best dates and times. It then provides you with a mechanism to accept a mutually agreeable time slot and confirm the meeting with everyone. Now, built right into the scheduler, is a button to “make it a Web conference” or “add a free conference call”.

The web-based conferencing system rivals WebEx and GoToMeeting. It is entirely Flash-based, so it requires zero download, and it seems to be pretty reliable and stable. Its capabilities include:

• share screen — for viewing someone else’s desktop. Perfect for demos.
• share documents — for viewing PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets and more.
• white board — for collaborative composition. The white board feature also lays over documents for real-time, collaborative annotations.
• co-browse — for the ability to share a web browser view, where any party can click on active links.

Another useful feature is TimeBridge Groups, with which you can group together different configurations of people such as your design group, your executive team and client teams. This feature makes it easier to schedule meetings with pre-designated groupings of people.

So what does the new web conferencing feature cost? The company’s CEO and founder, Yori Nelken, says that TimeBridge can price their new conferencing service competitively because they have no customer acquisition costs. They already have an enormous customer base for their free scheduler, so upgrades are an easy sell. What might cost $50 per month from a competitor is being offered by TimeBridge for $8.95 per month. Of course, when I heard that price, my eyes lit up.

How Web Workers Can Use It

I face several challenge as I’m growing my social media marketing company with web workers in five different locations in the U.S. and a new addition in the UK, including:

• training new hires on the proprietary ways we execute social media marketing tactics
• having virtual meetings with the entire team that can include demos and brainstorming
  
• showing clients in other parts of the world the social media assets we’ve created for them
• demoing samples of our work to potential clients remotely

TimeBridge’s price is attractive for a lean, mean virtual company in startup mode. And it seems like it could provide an immediate functionality and efficiency that is lacking from many virtual teams. I think it is brilliant to build out a suite of “virtual meeting” tools for the new way we’re doing work.

So What’s Missing?

Something that I think would enhance the TimeBridge toolset is the service from TimeDriver that I’ve been using to allow other people to select available time slots on my schedule to set in-person meetings for my time at South by Southwest Interactive. I mentioned this to the folks at TimeBridge, and they acknowledged — somewhat dismissively — that this is something for the future.

If TimeBridge is being touted as a “personal scheduler” with virtual meeting space capabilities, I think the missing piece of the puzzle is just that — personal scheduling. Since part of my web work includes virtual demos and, occasionally, in-person meetups, being able to give people access to open time slots on my calendar and letting them select and book the meetings themselves would be a killer app.

What are you using to schedule meetings? What apps do you use for web conferencing and free conference calls? Are your solutions integrated, and does that matter?

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Scheduling meetings is a necessary chore we face in business.  Managing multiple person’s calendars and finding a good time to meet involves many back and forth emails.  This is especially true when the persons you’re trying to meet with are on another electronic calendaring system.

To tackle this problem, I looked at Tungle last week. Now let’s look at a similar scheduling application: TimeBridge.

TimeBridge’s approach for addressing this frustrating issue comes from research involving personal assistants.  In my phone interview with TimeBridge CEO Yori Nelken, Mr. Nelken said the company spent hours interviewing personal assistants to find the insider’s tips and tricks for streamlining the scheduling process.  The TimeBridge application is not just a calendar view with all attendees’ free/busy data overlaid on each other.  They have built a meeting organization system with some handy add-ons to make it a powerful scheduling platform.

Currently TimeBridge supports two major calendaring platforms: Microsoft Exchange/Outlook and Google Calendar, including Google Apps for Your Domains.  The TimeBridge application works best when your contacts with whom you wish to meet ‘connect’ their calendars to TimeBridge.

This is done on the Microsoft side by downloading/installing an Outlook toolbar. With Google, you enter your Google sign-on credentials or you go through a process to give TimeBridge access to your Google Calendar.  Most privacy-conscious people will prefer the latter method.

The TimeBridge Process

Connecting your calendar isn’t necessary to arrange a meeting with TimeBridge, it just makes the process easier. For this post, I’ll run through the process assuming no participants have ‘connected’ their calendar to TimeBridge.

To begin scheduling a meeting, log in to TimeBridge and click “Schedule a Meeting”.  Next, enter in the participant’s email addresses, your meeting topic and proposed meeting time(s).  You can also add an optional conference call number at no charge.  Click “Send” and the email invitations are sent out to attendees.  You are also presented with an option to schedule a web conference with WebEx.

The recipients get a message with an invitation to pick which of your proposed meeting times works best for them.  They mark each time slot with their preferences based on their schedule.

After the attendee marks their preferences, a message is sent back to the meeting organizer where he/she finalizes the meeting time, based on everyone’s provided availability.

Finally, all attendees receive an email that contains a meeting notice that can be placed on their respective calendars.

Upon finalization of the meeting, the originator is presented with a link to schedule a reservation (if needed) with OpenTable – an online restaurant reservation service.

About TimeBridge

Mr. Nelken said the company received funding in December of 2005 and began operation in January 2006.  Their team of 24 has seen their usage double over and over about 4 times. They are targeting growth amongst users, rather than engaging CIO-types and IT shops.  TimeBridge has forged a relationship with Google and are providing Google a foot-in-the-door with enterprise customers who are looking at Google Calendar as a possibility for their organizations.

To monetize the product, they have a very innovative approach.  The optional conference call service is a revenue sharing agreement they have set up with the calling service providers.  This gives the company the opportunity to provide customers with a no-advertisement (and potentially annoying) call service and on the back-end, TimeBridge makes money too.  Additionally, the optional web conference option when arranging a meeting is an agreementw with WebEx whereby TimeBridge gets a fee for the new-users sign up.

Following the typical web 2.0 web service model, Nelken stated at some point they will have a premium package, but basic functionality will always remain free.

Conclusion

Tungle required a download and install of an IM-ish application that showed you your contact’s availabililty.  I like that TimeBridge is an Outlook add-in bar, keeping me within Outlook during the scheduling process.

Another interesting feature with TimeBridge is the ability to show your free/busy data on your website and/or social network.  You can register with TimeBridge and get either a widget or embed-able HTML code that you can use on any website.  This might be advantageous for a busy person to show their free/busy data directly on their website for all those who want to schedule a meeting with them.

TimeBridge creates a process for meeting scheduling that is easy and conducive to how meetings are set up in the “real world”.  The optional services makes scheduling meeting resources painless.  Their integration with Google Calendar is a plus, however I’m waiting for them, like Tungle, to support iCal on the Macintosh.  Nelken assured me an iCal application would be released in the near future.

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