Doodle Blog

Doodle today publishes its first international study on scheduling: We surveyed 2500 managers and administrative professionals in the US, the UK, Germany, France and the Nordics.

Professionals spend almost five hours each week to arrange meetings and use predominantly traditional means of finding the best time to meet. Hence, they can significantly cut down on this wasted time by using a scheduling service such as Doodle and finding their meeting times in a much more efficient manner.

Read about the details in our press release and study report.

The Doodle API Contest ended last week. We’re excited that 8 applications from 6 countries were submitted, covering anything from mobile  and application integrations to mashups we’d never have thought of.

We will not yet reveal the submissions. First, our jury will determine the contest winners. We expect to announce the winners in early May. Here are the members of our jury:

• Suhas Gopinath, Young Global Leader, Founder and CEO, Globals Inc.
• Alexander Hüsing, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, deutsche-startups.de
• Manuel Jaffrin, Patrick Liechti, Sun Microsystems
• Oliver Reichenstein, Founder and CEO, Information Architects
• Gina Trapani, Founding Editor, Smarterware, Lifehacker

With our latest release, we added a number of new features to Doodle. The most important one is Invite&Contact: You can now have Doodle invite your participants to a poll. This has the major advantage that Doodle then knows who you invited and can later help you contact these same people again to send a reminder or tell them about the final date & time your event will take place.

Here’s how it works:

• As the final step after creating a new poll, Doodle now allows you to inivite people. This is an option, you can still send the Doodle links out via your own mail application. If you invite from Doodle, you’ll be taken to a form where you can enter the invitees’ e-mail addresses and the message. Doodle will then send the message to those people.
• Doodle will store the e-mail addresses you enter here. Hence, the next time you use the Invite&Contact feature, Doodle will suggest e-mail addresses it knows already when you start typing. Our Privacy Policy states that we won’t misuse these addresses and that you can delete them at any time if you wish.
• Alternatively, or complementary, you can connect to your Google addressbook to use the e-mail addresses that are stored there. Note that we do not store the whole Google addressbook on our servers, so there will be no privacy and no sync issues.
• Once the people are invited, you can use the poll’s admin link to contact the invitees again: E.g., send them a reminder that they’re supposed to participate or let them know what the final date and time for your event is. Doodle provides a number of templates with typical texts for these use cases to make things more convenient and efficient for you.

We also released a number of minor news:

• People often asked us to make it possible to adjust some of the advanced options even after a poll has been created. This is now possible: You can, for example, “unhide” a hidden poll.
• We have our 29th language: Indonesian. Thank you, Martin Hadinata!

The 13th annual Webby Awards received over 9,000 entries from over 60 countries. Winners are chosen by the International Academy of Digitals Arts and Sciences, a global organization whose members include David Bowie, Harvey Weinstein, Arianna Huffington, Matt Groening, Vinton Cerf, and Biz Stone. Doodle is a honoree in the Services & Applications category and was chosen by the jury for its “remarkable achievement” and the “outstanding caliber of work”.

We are happy to announce that Doodle has surpassed the three million user mark globally (source: Google Analytics) with a growth up 167 per cent compared to this time last year. Read our press release for more number crunching.