For the past few months FuseCal has been in the process of acquiring iFreeBusy.com and we’re happy to report that the acquisition is now complete! If you havent already, check out www.iFreeBusy.com. Its a free service that lets you upload and share your free/busy information. For now, what this all means is that we’ll continue to run and maintain the iFreeBusy site. Long term, we’re excited about integrating iFreeBusy into some sweet new FuseCal features.
Thanks to Neil Jensen for all your work on iFreeBusy!
This is the first time I have written in the FuseCal blog. I will not be reflecting on the technology, or discussing new features. I wanted to share how a real-life user can use FuseCal as a time-saving and organizational tool.
I have children in college, high school, and grade school. All of them are involved in different activities and I volunteer to coach youth sports. By using FuseCal, I am able to subscribe to all of their calendars and track games, practices, and school activities. As a coach, I can create a team calendar and roster it so only team parents can view and subscribe.
I also subscribe to the Hallmark calendar to keep track of upcoming holidays to ensure I don’t miss anything. By using the create calendar function, I am able to load in birthdays and anniversaries for our large extended family and allow access to only family members.
The possibilities are endless… We would welcome your ideas on how to use FuseCal.
Ladies and Gentlemen, its offical: the FuseCal Beta has arrived in all its Beta glory. After months of long nights and lots of really terrible chinese food, its finally here. We’re thrilled with the new look and feel and all the new features, and we hope you will be too. Check out a list of all the new features or just go ahead and give it a try and let us know what you think. We’ve been working hard to make FuseCal a better product for you so we always appreciate hearing back from you. Hope you all enjoy it!
Hey fellow FuseCal’ers, we’re just a few weeks away from the launch of the highly anticipated FuseCal Beta. We’ve all been working around the clock for the past few months and we’re excited to show you what we’ve got. (Incidentally, one of our developers, Kyle, is teeming with so much excitement that he’ll probably be writing some guest blog entries in the near future).
The FuseCal Beta release is going to have a whole new set of features to help you manage your schedules and improve productivity. One of the big features we’ve been working on is event editing. The Beta release will allow you to edit your events and create new events all through the FuseCal web interface. We also made significant improvements to our calendar aggregation process, allowing you to easily create combined calendars out of your many FuseCal calendars. Throw in an entirely redesigned UI and a host of new sharing features and you’re looking at what may just be the best software release since FuseCal Alpha.
We’ll continue to keep you updated on the specifics of the release as we get closer to the date. If you’re interested in giving us feedback about the release and helping shape the future of FuseCal please email me (Matt.Hatoun@FuseCal.com) and ask to be put on the Beta testers list. We’re working hard to make FuseCal a better product and we appreciate all the feedback we can get.
Paul Hubbard at Fnord has written up an awesome new use for FuseCal, which none of us had thought of before- By harvesting the schedules from his local area sports teams and filtering out the away games, Paul has created an iCal feed that roughly predicts traffic congestion in San Diego. How cool is that?
Anyways, Paul explains the steps, essentially giving you a recipe for creating the same type of feed for your town. So, check out his article, and drop us a line to let us know what kind of cool, potentially unexpected uses you’ve found for FuseCal. We’d love to hear from you!
I try my best to keep the FuseCal blog updated with interesting and pertinent tidbits about FuseCal (and calendar apps in general), but some things I want to tell you about aren’t really suited to blog posts, ya know? So, I’ve set up a couple Twitter accounts that should help keep you up to date on the real minutae of FuseCal, in case you’re into that kind of thing.
@FuseCalStatus will contain a blurb about the current state of FuseCal.com. Outages, goofups, mixups, whatever- this is the place to hear about ‘em. Hopefully this will remain a rare occurrence, and the status will remain “okay,” but alpha software isn’t always stable, so we want to make sure you’ll always have a way to know what’s up! (In fact, very soon you’ll see these status in the header of each page on FuseCal.com, so you won’t even have to subscribe to those posts in order to gain from the benefit of all its wisdom.)
@FuseCal has been around for a while, and I use it to sort of keep my finger on the pulse of the online calendaring space. Feel free to DM me there with any calendaring questions, and I’ll try my best to help you out- even if the best solution has nothing to do with FuseCal.
Jon Udell has been posting a great series of tutorials that explain ways to publish events to the web from various calendar apps. So far he has covered Apple iCal, Google Calendar, and Outlook, and it looks like more (possibly Exchange server?) might be on the way… you can follow the entire series of posts here.
This breakdown of moving information from your calendar application onto the web is a great complement to FuseCal’s feature set, which currently has a focus on moving events in the opposite direction. In fact, a number of people have asked us about adding exactly this kind of functionality to FuseCal- We hear you!
Right now, I simply can’t recommend a better resource for accomplishing this task than these tutorials. In fact, Jon’s blog is chock full of plenty more posts that are worth a read for anyone interested in getting the most out of online calendaring. Check it out!
For about 3 hours yesterday (Monday, April 28, 2008), a small number of calendars were inaccessible inside FuseCal. In fact, if you logged in during that time, it would have appeared that the calendars had disappeared. The truth is that we accidentally deleted them while performing some fairly routine site maintenance. Since we made a backup of the database right before starting that work, we were able to restore everything very soon after we became aware of the problem.
We’re really sorry about any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused you. We believe everything to be back to normal now. Please let us know if you’re having any remaining issues!
Thanks a lot for using FuseCal. We appreciate your time and attention, and we’re working hard to make it as useful as possible.
We’re back from yet another awesome trip, this time to O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Bill, Mike, and I had an excellent time and met a lot of really great folks. Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth in the the Long Tail Pavilion!
One crew we met out there were guys from Angelsoft, who were going from booth to booth recording 1-minute video pitches from the various startups. I think it’s awesome how they’ve created a record of some really new companies… Doubtless, within a few years, some of these have the potential to be pretty big names, and you’ll be able to look back and see them at a very early stage. For context: what’s the oldest video you can find online of Larry and Sergey talking about Google?
Here’s the pitch I gave them. I think it came out pretty good, although I had no idea I moved my head so much when I talked. Weird. Anyways, let me know what you think!
This may be a month on the late side, but I’d be remiss if I never posted anything about our trip to SxSW. The short version is that Austin was a total blast. Tibet and I had the most ridiculously awesome time, and met all kinds of high quality people. Frankly, it was such an obnoxiously amazing time that I’ve been putting off writing about it - I had no idea where to start!
Fortunately our friends from Batch Blue were kind enough to document some of FuseCal’s SxSW saga to video. Thanks to Michelle’s expert documentarian-ship, I can just let my talking do the talking… Did that makes sense?
With no further ado, allow me to present:
FuseCal.com’s sad SXSW tale
It’s true - Delta temporarily lost a very important bag of ours. But I like to think we made the best of the situation, inventing the “shitty card” in the process.
FuseCal.com has a fancy SXSW booth
We were on such a roll with the “shitty cards,” that we had to up the ante just a little…
Believe it or not, the self-awarded Fanciest Booth prize may have been our greatest asset at the trade show. Folks in the SxSW crowd generally had great senses of humor, so I think this was actually a really remarkable way to make an impression and start a conversation, which of course led to talking about FuseCal.com.
On the last day of the trade show, the SxSW organizers were even cool enough to announce over the loudspeaker that FuseCal.com had won the Fanciest Booth award, making the title almost-kinda-sorta-quasi-official. Sweet!
Who needs schwag or a big marketing budget when you’ve got notebook paper and tape?
