Doodle Blog

Update: Mario Lopez Ramos won the free Jazoon ‘09 ticket. Congratulations!

Jazoon’09 – The International Conference on Java Technology –  will take place in Zurich, Switzerland from 22 to 25 June 2009. Doodle is also involved:

• Paul and David will have a session on OAuth on Thursday.
• Doodle is an official partner and provides Branded Doodle for the conference organizers.
• Most importantly, you will get a 20% discount on your conference pass (saving CHF 362) if you register for Jazoon via Doodle. To do so, simply enter your name and e-mail address in our form. The form will be open until May 31st. We will also draw one free full conference pass among all the people who register. So there’s another good reason to register.

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.

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.)