Web 2.0 meeting apps

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. ***

MIAMI--The way people have been talking about e-mail at the Future of Web Apps conference, you"d think it were a cell phone carrier or a domestic airline. It"s antiquated, it"s backward, and everybody hates it. Kevin Marks, a Google engineer and Technorati veteran, said in a talk about the company"s OpenSocial project and Social Graph APIs that e-mail is a "strange legacy idea." "E-mail has died away for a group of users. For the younger generation, they don"t use e-mail," he said, talking about the young Web users who have started to abandon e-mail for Facebook messaging and mobile texting. "They see it as this noisy spam-filled thing that annoys them every day...they see it as how you talk to the university, how you talk to the bank. ***

Today at the Office 2.0 Conference, Zoho (more coverage) is announcing the new, paid business edition of its Web applications suite. Companies will be able to get user administration, company branding, and domain mapping (just like Google Apps for My domain), backup, pooled storage, and telephone support. When the product launches in October, it will cost about $40 per year per user. Zoho Business Edition gives companies administrative controls for its users. ***