Doodle Blog

A new product for Doodle lovers is now available, Premium Doodle: a personal profile that allows you to express your individuality when scheduling. Premium Doodle gives scheduling a whole new identity – yours! You can customize all your Doodle polls with your own colors and add your profile picture which will appear whenever you participate in a poll. For a fee of just $28 annually all polls you initiate and participate in will be ad-free. Premium functionality will also allow you to request personal information such as postal address, e-mail address, and phone number from poll participants – particularly helpful for binding RSVPs. We’re looking forward to welcoming Premium Doodle customers and thank them for the support they give us through it!

Get Premium Doodle now or read more!

Read the media release.

We just finished putting our August release online. Here are the major improvements:

• Extended calendar integration: You were already able to subscribe to the Doodle ICS feed to keep your calendar up-to-date with the latest Doodle information. Starting today, you can also import your calendar information into your MyDoodle account and have Doodle suggest your availabilities based on your calendar whenever you need to fill in a poll. This feature requires you to open a MyDoodle account; afterwards, you will be able to add your calendar feed here.
• Locations: We introduced an optional feature that allows you to specify an event’s location. The feature is based on Google Maps internationally and on Local.ch in Switzerland.
• Improved XING app: Our Doodle XING app was launched only recently and is already among the most popular apps on XING. As a consequence, we get lots of feedback, and we take it seriously by introducing the following improvements: 1) Users can now merge their XING Doodle account with their normal Doodle account and see the combined dashboard in both worlds. 2) Poll participants can easily be found and invited using the new contact search with auto-completion. 3) Additional participants can be invited even after a poll has been set up. To the Doodle XING app…
• More payment methods: We’ve incorporated Moneybookers and are now able to offer many additional and more convenient payment options to our Branded Doodle customers who want to use Doodle for their business, e.g. many credit cards, bank transfer, etc.

Update August 3 2009: Doodle implements 3 improvements for the XING app

Doodle is launch partner of the new XING Partner Ecosystem. Being a social network, XING enables a number of interesting functions: XING members can recognize Doodle polls they have in common with others, they see the profile picture when someone participates in a poll, and they can invite XING contacts to a meeting with just one click. Starting today, Doodle can be easily installed as a XING application.

Picok is an open source “Personal Information Cockpit” built by LIIP. The latest version (1.0.1) added support for Doodle portlets. Read more about Picok on their web site: www.picok.ch

Picok Screenshot

TechCrunch opened voting for the best European startups today. Doodle is nominated as “Best Bootstrapped Startup”. Whatever that means exactly: All Doodle users – vote for us now!

And while you’re at it, please vote for our friends at Wuala, too. (They’re in a different category.)

Wow! Murphy hit us hard today. Two of our servers failed simultaneously. Other — non-related – problems made us hunt down the wrong causes for a while. In the end, Doodle was not available for quite some time today. We apologize for the downtime and the inconvience this has caused.

Here’s the good news:

• All systems are back online.
• There was no data loss whatsoever.
• We have used this opportunity to add another server and to optimize a number of system parameters to make sure that Doodle will run even more reliably and responsively in the future.
• We have contingency plans for a number of scenarios in place, and it’s reassuring to see that they work. We’ll just have to be even faster next time.

Facebook announced their Verified Apps program in early 2009 and we applied as one of the first applications. A few weeks ago, Facebook told us they would launch the program with an official announcement. However, they seem to have decided to silently launch the program: We never noticed anything official but our app is now wearing the verified badge.

Here’s what this means for the users of the app (from the Facebook FAQ):

Verified applications have passed a detailed Facebook review to confirm that the user experience they provide complies with Facebook policies. Verified applications have committed to be transparent about how they work and will respect you and your friends when they send communication on your behalf.

Because these applications have passed a review by Facebook, they are prioritized higher in the application directory and are highlighted by a green checkmark. A “Verified Apps” badge will appear on their Profile Pages as well.

Visit the Doodle app on Facebook

We are happy to announce the winners of the Doodle API Contest today! Doodlendar, an application that integrates Doodle’s scheduling system with Google Calendar, developed by two students at the ETH Zurich, won first prize. Second and third prizes went to Manymoon (USA) and DoodleZack (Austria). Winners were chosen by a jury of web pros out of eight approved applications from six different countries.

“It’s great to see that working on an own project gets such appreciation,” said the winners Michael Schaufelberger (white shirt) and Stephan Merkli (blue shirt) yesterday at the “award ceremony”. Instead of the original prize, a trip to Zurich, they decided to take the cash prize: “Cash is easier to divide by the two of us… (Is it really? – see photo) … and we aren’t too worried about finding a way to spend it.”

Doodle CEO Michael Naef (black shirt) presents our API competition winners with first prize

With Doodlendar (introduction) one can use Doodle to schedule events in Google Calendar. Doodle’s meeting time options are added as tentative events in Google Calendar. As soon as a poll is closed and a definite time slot is chosen – this will be saved as the only appointment in the calendar. “Doodlendar is a useful and smooth marriage of Doodle and the widely-used calendar app. I love the side-by-side calendar to poll view,” jury member Gina Trapani (Founding Editor of Smarterware and Lifehacker) said about the winning application.

The runner-up, social productivity application Manymoon with ManyDoodle, commented: “We are excited to be using Doodle’s API to add the ability to schedule events within Manymoon. Our customers are already using our Doodle integration to schedule business events every day,” said co-founder Amit Kulkarni.

A big “Thank you!” to all participants and special thanks to the jury and our sponsors! 

• Sun Startup Essentials
• NOKIA
• Zurich Tourism
• Victorinox

This week is Work Wise Week in the UK and many firms will be looking to deploy or increase homeworking strategies for employees. Companies, however, should look beyond purely connectivity and security issues to make remote working a success. “Applications such as online scheduling tools should form part of the overall technology armoury as part of a cultural change in the way companies view remote working”, said Phil Flaxton, chief executive of Work Wise UK. Read more in our press release! Making homeworking work better: Streamlining with Web platforms essential, Doodle says