So you’re on Facebook, trying to pass that one mob boss on MafiaWars, when suddenly you can invited to a party. And not just any party, this is the single coolest party there ever will be. This is the epitome of all parties, and anybody who’s anybody will be there – even some of those guys won’t be allowed in. You accept the invitation, but because you’re still stuck on that one boss, you don’t update your calendar (whether it be outlook, iCal, Google Calendar or others). The day comes, and since you don’t have it in your calendar, you simply forget about the party, never show up and are ostracized from civilized society forced to spend the rest of your life in a cave.
While electronic calendars are a great tool, and one many have been relying on for years, they still have the unfortunate quality of being disconnected. Sure, they can talk to each other, but not much beyond that. Updating our calendars with outside activities – birthdays, anniversaries, parole hearings – falls mainly on us, and there is a distinct lack of interconnectivity. It is also quite clear that there dozens of ways we can improve and streamline our day to day calendar management, as well was the way our friends, family and countless other organizations and services transfer information into our calendars.
This problem is abundantly clear not just to the end user, but to many start-up companies, and they are all racing against each other and giants like Google in order to provide a quality solution. We believe that the electronic calendar is one of the premier gateways new internet companies can use to break in. The competition with Google and Facebook for our time monitoring capabilities is going to get rough pretty quickly.
Just as e-mail provided a doorway for social networks to get in contact with us and identify us online, as well as send us millions of invitations and suggestions and things to do, so can our calendar, which is slowly becoming as standardized as e-mail, will be the tether between our web-presence and our physical/business/commercial activities. This is the very same connection people have been trying to form since the glory days of dot.com. In the future, are calendar may very well dictate to other services not just how to approach us and what to offer, but when.
A new Israeli start-up will attempt, starting this week, to charge our calendars at full force and populate it with business offers and invitations to real events that may interest us. Significal (formerly Zoharis) is entering its open beta this week.
The company was founded by four entrepreneurs, CEO Amos Kahana, CTO Spencer Bruce, development manager Leonid Zhitomirsky and business development manager Menashe Shilon. Their upcoming product will allow commercial organizations to send informations about events and feed them directly into Google Calendar and Outlook.
We got the chance to see Significal in action today, and we must say – it is extremely easy to receive information about events that interest us and fit into our schedule with their application. We also got word of some of the companies slated to collaborate with Significal, and we can be colored a very vivid impressed.
We are a hard group to please when it comes to web applications, so when we say that Significal caught our eye and is something we plan to use regularly, that’s a true feat. We really hope the service will help us divide our time, efficiently, between a wide variety of social, cultural and even sporting events, as well as offer us interesting commercial deals just when we need them (nothing beats hearing about a 50% off sale on Plasma TVs 3 days before the world cup).
We have yet to see how Significal integrates with Facebook and other social networks, and if they offer a solution of checking your calendar through Facebook without sacrificing privacy and security, but should they overcome these hurdles, they may be on to something very very interesting.
Translated by Itai Rosenbaum
Join Our Newsletter
Follow us on Twitter
It‘s quite in here! Why not leave a response?