This past weekend, we took FuseCal offline. While we’re hopeful we can someday revive it, for the time being the economics just aren’t working in our favor.

Our apologies for not giving any advanced notice. We had hoped to avoid this situation but had to make the decision precipitously when it became clear that the several alternatives we were pursuing were not going to be realized. We’ve always worked hard to actively communicate with our users and we’re sorry we were unable to do so at such a critical time.

We’re all proud of the progress we made but very disappointed that we haven’t been able to get it to the finish line. We can’t thank you enough for your support and again send our apologies for not communicating better. All of your comments, criticisms or suggestions would still be, as always, greatly appreciated.

Yours,

The FuseCal Team

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.

Wishing you a happy and prosperous 2009.

Dominick, VP of Business Development, 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!

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.

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!

I just had to wish y’all a happy Leap Day.  Did anyone run into any calendar bugs today?  Enquiring minds want to know!