Episode 1: Google Calendar v. the Competition
15 March Michael Arrington
For our inaugural podcast, we invite Ethan Stock, Founder of Zvents and Narendra Rocherolle, Founder of 30boxes, to discuss Google’s new Calendar product, to be called “CL2″. We also talk about how Zvents and 30Boxes will (somehow) find a way to compete as the big guys enter the space with next generation calendar and event search products. Also participating are Nik Cubrilovic and Keith Teare.
Podcast Notes:
- Narendra talks about how he sold, bought back and re-sold Webshots.com for a total of $150 million
- We discuss the very low costs of creating a new web startup today
- Mike talks about why CL2 will be very hard to compete against
- Ethan and Narendra defend their startups
- Discussion of the importance of synching in and out of calendars to Outlook
- Ethan and Narendra talk about new upcoming features
- Discussion of marketing strategies for CL2 competitors
- TechCrunch profiles on Zvents and 30Boxes
March 15th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
March 15th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
March 15th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
March 15th, 2006 at 10:08 pm
March 15th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
March 15th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
March 17th, 2006 at 7:20 am
April 1st, 2006 at 3:06 pm
April 4th, 2006 at 12:36 am
April 4th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
Comments
March 15th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
Regarding the sync offline/online calendar everybody seems to forget that there s already a fantastic service doing that: PLAXO.COM
They just need to have a better/faster UI
March 15th, 2006 at 10:48 pm
Ouriel, huh? Plaxo? Does the fact that they are one of the larger spammers on the net affect your opinion?
March 15th, 2006 at 10:50 pm
*Shudders at the thought of Plaxo*
Nice first podcast - do you think it might be handy to put the length of the podcast somewhere?
March 15th, 2006 at 11:13 pm
Awesome first podcast Michael. You seemed comfortable hosting the podcast.
Can’t wait for the next one!
March 15th, 2006 at 11:23 pm
Hey thanks Aaron. I like doing these things. It’s more personal than just writing.
March 15th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
Good to have you do a podcast that isn’t going to be rail roader by Steve Gillmore!
Keep up the good work.
Molly
March 15th, 2006 at 11:51 pm
Thanks Molly, although I would have never done this without encouragement from Steve. He’s the best and I love that he challenges my sometimes random rants.
March 16th, 2006 at 12:25 am
Mike, indeed Plaxo has a lot of work to do (in terms of spam also), but i think they could show the way as they have a fantastic user base and a good sync tool. They miss velocity and calendar sharing option.
March 16th, 2006 at 3:44 am
Mike, not sure where you are getting show ideas from, not sure you need many ideas
the show today was superb! Time to dig out the ipod and load it up. I would like to hear a shout from you guys on how you decide whats hot and whats not. Everytime I turn around you’ve been dugg or are popping up in my delicious popular… you definitely know your stuff.
I’ve got lots of great ideas (dont we all) but will make sure the next one I try is “crunchworthy” (like bigcite.com apparently wasnt) Whats hot in the marketplace man?
March 16th, 2006 at 4:26 am
Where is the item on this page that I drag to iTunes to subscribe to this podcast?
I see listen now but nothing with the podcast URL.
March 16th, 2006 at 4:27 am
Cool Podcast.
As for online calendars, the best online calendaring service regarding functionality (for me) is the one at Planzo.com
30boxes has better style… but Planzo almost seems capable of stuff that you can do in Mozilla’s Sunbird. (Though I can’t tell for sure if there is some kind of validation service for ics files… since I remember not being able to import some files from one service to another).
The bad thing about Planzo is that there has been some memory loss (I’ve input some data to some events and only changed one event, or something like that, and somehow the notes I had typed get erased…)
March 16th, 2006 at 6:27 am
Where is the RSS feed of TalkCrunch?
March 16th, 2006 at 6:31 am
Hi Mike,
Great work! I’m looking forward to more. One favour: could you please fill out your ID3 tags in the mp3, i.e. Artist and Album. Those of us who listen to a lot of podcasts will appreciate it.
Thanks!
March 16th, 2006 at 6:32 am
Are you going to submit it to iTunes?
March 16th, 2006 at 6:53 am
Duration & size of files would be cool.
I never download podcasts longer than 30 min.
it’s too boring to listen to loooong murmurings.
And too much bandwidth (it’s not so cheap here in Ukraine), when you subscribe and downlosd regullary.
March 16th, 2006 at 7:15 am
Great inaugural podcast, Michael…and a meaty topic indeed.
The whole online/offline syncing issue that you and Keith focused on is a critical one that both your guests and other calendaring start-ups need to think hard about.
Can’t wait for the next podcast.
michael
March 16th, 2006 at 9:32 am
Michael, since you labelled Plaxo as one of the “largest spammers on the Internet”, do you want to back that up with facts? I’d be curious how many “spam” message you have received from “us” and how we truly rank in the World Spam Ratings.
The fact is–and I’ll bet that you already know this–Plaxo is an extremely useful service with a hard-working, ethical team trying to address a real problem. Another fact is that the service has generated too many member emails in the past and we have done many things to address this. And, we are doing even more to educate our users and reduce unwanted member emails. While this may seem like a cop-out, the emails that you label as “spam” are sent by our members to people in their address books. The problem is that often people do not recognize the person that is sending a contact request email. It is extremely rare that these emails are truly spam.
But, labelling us as “spammers” is unfair and probably does more damage than you realize.
btw: Others who have made similiar comments change their minds after they actually see how the service works, rather than guess and pontificate.
March 16th, 2006 at 9:34 am
Oops, I forgot to actually comment on the topic. Plaxo is actively working on the stuff that Ouriel mentioned. Stay tuned for some exciting new calendar stuff from Plaxo.
March 16th, 2006 at 10:01 am
I am looking for the feed to your podcast so I can add it to iTunes. Please advise…
March 16th, 2006 at 10:23 am
Nice embedded player, Michael. Any way to make comments slide onto the podcast’s page, though?
Like so: http://shiftingpixel.com/ (click on “Info and comments” and see how it slides).
Cause then we could comment while listening to the show.
March 16th, 2006 at 10:34 am
Nick, Thanks, and that is bugging me too. I also want a way to skip around on the file instead of being forced to listen to the whole thing. Working on it with Nik.
March 16th, 2006 at 10:44 am
I’m tired of “podcasts” that are just links to .mp3 files. Please publish the feed and make it easy to find. Thanks!
March 16th, 2006 at 10:55 am
Hey Michael, great first podcast, and I’m glad Goowy got a mention. I’ve been using it for a long time and I think it’s a great Flash example. You guys also talked about the sync-online/offline problem and I thought I’d point out Adobe’s Apollo project.
It’s part of the Flash platform and it aims to give Flash applications a way to take data offline and run on any platform that runs Flash. It’s still in the very early stages, but the potential is huge.
March 16th, 2006 at 11:14 am
Great first podcast… I think you should up the ante on the audio quality, though. Sounds like you’re phoning it in. All you need is a good microphone and audacity.
Here’s the best microphone bang for your buck: http://www.zzounds.com/item–SAMC01U
It’s USB, so just plug it in… and audacity is simple to use. Looking forward to hearing more.
March 16th, 2006 at 11:18 am
The podcast was excellent. I’d like future podcasts to focus more on “the business of Web 2.0″.
March 16th, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Dean - Will you expand on that? I’m not sure what you mean.
March 16th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
This is wonderful. Thank you. I was tearing my hair out listening to you attempt to finish a sentence without steve gillmor cutting you off, talking over you, or rambling on for 5 minutes about something completely irrelevant.
March 16th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
Hi everyone - thanks for your feedback. As you all know this is the first episode of our first podcast so we are taking your feedback for the second episode. The RSS feed is here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Talkcrunch it contains the episodes as enclosures
Also - we will be on iTunes within the next 24 hours, I will update the blog once it is up.
March 16th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
Great job on the first podcast!! Very informative. I am a traveling salesman who has followed the Web 2.0 craze for a while now. I challenged myself to find a web based Outlook alternative. I have been using 30boxes on my qtek 9100 for a while and it is very functional. I have found there mobile site, for a version 1, very useful. Once you understand the quick add feature it is tremendous. I wish there was more functionality on the mobile version and I can not wait for features like a basic task lists.
The mobile warrior.
Jacksonville, Florida
March 16th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
Well Podserve seems to have removed the file for some reason. We are moving it to our own servers. Apologies…
March 16th, 2006 at 5:43 pm
Yep I put it back up on Podserve but until we find out why it just dissapeared I will be getting it onto our own server.
March 16th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
Here is the iTunes link:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=132832280&s=143460
March 17th, 2006 at 1:00 am
“Duration & size of files would be cool.”
Too right also the ID3 tags aswell would be appreciated.
Our national internet service provider in New Zealand are in dispute with the costly price of broadband aswell as the speed, they have recently advertised that it’ll increase to “faster” speeds - hopefully TalkCrunch will have updated by then!
Thanks Aaron
March 18th, 2006 at 9:38 pm
Two way syncing is not an easy task to acomplish. Having worked for Intellisync in the past I can safely say that most sync solutions are really bad. Intellisync had a good system for duplicate detection and conflict resolution but was let down by an outdated UI and hard to maintain code. I see that things really haven’t got much better since then. I tried plaxo.com last week and spent 2 hours cleaning up the mess it created in my contacts list. What we need is a seemless 2 way sync of cals across various web services and PC based systems (Outlook, iCal, etc.) that is robust and recovers gracefully from network errors, etc.
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:31 am
After testing many of the web calendar apps, I swear by 30Boxes. I don’t think Google could come up with anything I’d like better at this point.
Hats off to them for their excellent RSS support — I’ve added 30Boxes to my Yahoo start page, NetVibes and a few others just to play around with it and it works beautifully. Now that they’ve enabled the SMS alerts, it’s just perfect.