Doodle Blog

Paul’s report from the Venture Leaders 2009 jury:

Last year, I had the privilege of being one of Switzerland’s twenty Venture Leaders. Here’s what I had to say at the end of the program: “I was worried that we would waste time on chitchatting and sipping cocktails. As it turned out, «venture leaders» is an intense business-training program that will help me much better face various challenges that still lie ahead for our company.”

Last Thursday (in Lausanne) and Friday (in Zurich), I was asked to serve on the jury to pick the next 20 Venture Leaders. Looking at Switzerland’s start-up scene, it’s hard to believe that the economy is not doing too well right now. Thirty-eight company founders or project members (when a university project has not resulted in a spin-off yet) pitched their case by giving a 10-minute talk followed by 10 minutes of Q&A. Biotech and medtech always sound like rocket science to me. But I was also in awe of several software engineers.

My fellow jurors and I had a very hard time limiting the number of entrepreneurs to take part in this year’s Venture Leaders program to twenty when at least twenty-five contestants would have deserved it. Here they are: Venture Leaders 2009. Congratulations!

Peter Cohan at BloggingStocks has a series called Growth Matters, in which he looks at consumer technology companies that point the way to growth trends — and in the process introduce services and products you may want to explore. In his latest issue, Peter covered Doodle: Doodle gets your schedule right.

We’re launching a number of exciting features today:

• The Doodle Outlook Plugin brings together the most popular scheduling service with the widest-used calendar system on the market. Outlook users can use the plugin to automatically fill in Doodle polls and to book tentative and final slots in their calendar. More info and installation instructions
• The MyDoodle ICS Calendar Feed connects Doodle to all other major calendars like Google Calendar, Sunbird, or Mac’s iCal and keeps users updated on the state of their Doodle polls. Access your personal ICS Feed (requires MyDoodle)
• The new Branded Doodle service enables companies and other organisations to purchase their own private Doodle, branded with their logo and name, optionally ads-free or with SSL support to encrypt all traffic. Using our new setup wizard, a Branded Doodle can be ready within minutes. More info and access to the setup wizard
• The Doodle API is RESTful and supports the OAuth, the promising protocol to allow secure authorization of web services. To promote the API, we have teamed up with Sun Microsystems and Nokia and now challenge the Doodle community to build great apps and submit them to the Doodle API Contest. Deadline is April 14. More info about the contest and the API
• The showcase app for the Doodle API is the Doodle Mail Init Agent. The agent is a power user feature that allows to create Doodle polls via e-mail rather than the web. The agent tries hard to recognize all variations of dates and times like “Tue”, “Tuesday”, “Mar 3rd”, “3/3″, etc. To find out more, send an e-mail to init@doodle.com. (The agent will also answer at marvin@, smith@, and other aliases.)