Doodle Blog

Source: Intel

One of our main goals is to provide online scheduling for everyone. Together with the Swiss organizations AGILE and Egalité Handicap we have able to make Doodle more accessible for blind and visually impaired individuals. the scheduling tool with the help of specific website reading devices. These changes also helped us improve the overall structure and code quality of our web pages.

“The improved accessibility offered by Doodle enables blind and visually impaired people to easily attend meetings and other events,” AGILE writes in its press release. “This is a tangible act for better integration and equal treatment of users.”

We’re proud to launch Arabic as our 30th language today! Arabic is one of the most important languages, spoken by several hundred million people. With Arabic, Doodle is now available in all six official languages of the United Nations, in the official language of 171 countries and in the mother tongue for more than 2.3 billion people. Thank you Junaid Chaudhry for the support!

Our latest release is online since yesterday. It focuses mainly on performance: We have analyzed many aspects of the service and optimized various parameters like ETags and content compression. Steve Souders’ “High Performance Web Sites” has been of great help and the results are astonishing. So we’re happy to provide an even faster and more reliable Doodle experience.

Today the print copy of  Tim Ferris‘ updated bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek arrived in our Zurich office. What a surpise! Doodle is mentioned in the section “One Shot, One Kill Scheduling Without E-mail Back-and-Forth” on page 115. According to our own research business professionals waste an average of 5 hours weekly with coordinating meetings alone! That means that there’s a huge potential for time savings – and escaping the scheduling pain – by using Doodle.

Only a couple of hours to go this year. So it’s time to look back at some of Doodle’s highlights 2009:

• Passed the 3 million users mark in April and continued to experience very healthy growth rates ever since then
• Named one of Switzerland’s best web sites, one of Switzerland’s most innovative companies, and a global innovator
• Conducted and published a much cited international study on scheduling behavior in corporations
• Launched the Doodle iPhone app
• Introduced paid services for organizations (Branded Doodle) and private individuals (Premium Doodle)
• And, most importantly, implemented a long list of improvements and extensions to make scheduling even easier, quicker, and more comfortable: close date/time polls, invite and inform participants from within Doodle directly (including an address book), XING integration, locations and maps, file attachments, calendar integrations (Outlook, Google Calendar, Lotus Notes, …), more translations, API, etc.

We would like to thank all our users and customers for their support and wish you all the best for 2010!

Red Herring writes:

Selected from a pool of 1,200 worldwide applicants, these global innovators are the ones to watch as they disrupt their respective industries.

Together with Doodle, a total of 12 Swiss startups are nominated for the award. The winners will be announced in mid-January.

• All the nominees on the Red Herring web site

Our most recent annoucements were focussed on our paid products: the advanced efficiency features for Premium Doodle and Branded Doodle and the iPhone App. However, Doodle’s free functionality made great progress as well. Here are are the most important new features of 2009:

• Close polls and pick final date and time
• RESTful API
• ICS Feed to connect electronic calendars
• Doodle Outlook Plugin
• Invite & Contact for Doodle invitations
• XING application
• Locations with Google Maps
• File upload with drop.io
• Doodle Gadget for Firefox, Gmail and Google Calendar
• Doodle Widget for Lotus Notes
• Mobile Doodle: out of Beta and MyDoodle support
• Languages 27, 28 and 29: Czech, Hebrew, and Indonesian

Who better to advance online scheduling than its pioneer, Doodle? In a recent market study we surveyed online schedulers to learn what capability would next be of greatest value to them; the sample of respondents clearly prioritized getting reliable, prompt responses from all meeting participants. In direct response, we’re releasing new efficiency features—Quick Reply and binding RVSPs.

Check out Premium Doodle and Branded Doodle!

Or read more in our press release.

We’re pleased to report that our iPhone app is now available. Through our collaboration with Neoos, we are providing core Doodle features in a native iPhone way that make scheduling even easier and more fun on the run.  In Switzerland we are already experiencing an overwhelming reception–thank you to all the early adopters who so quickly grabbed the app and have provided us with such positive feedback! It is available in the iTunes App Store for $ 2.99 or € 2.39.

Learn more and grab the app!

Laura Stack put together some valulable tips for getting control over the time eaten up by meetings. Its worth reading!

Office Productivity: Stop the Meeting Madness