I met Eric Ly, founder of Presdo, two and a half years ago. At the time, he was co-founder and founding CTO at LinkedIn. Over lunch, I told him where I'd like the LinkedIn platform to go. He listened, agreed with the direction, but remained noncommittal. Six months later, I met him again, this time for breakfast. He had left LinkedIn, and was working on a new idea, losely related to meeting scheduling. I asked him to be on the short list of people he would show his first prototype to. Five months ago, we met for breakfast again, and he gave me a first demo. I was the first to blog about it, which almost cost him an article on TechCrunch (I'm really glad he still got one). The application was great, and was only missing a direct link to Google Calendar. Today, this has been fixed.
Over the past week or so, Eric and his team worked around the clock to develop the scheduling system we are using to schedule demos and meetings during the Office 2.0 Conference. This thing is amazing. As a registered attendee, you select the company you want to schedule a meeting with (say OBM), click on the schedule meeting link, and Presdo automatically suggests three candidate times, based on your availability and the other party's availability, both fetched from Google Calendar in real time. If you don't like any of the suggestions, you simply click on the "See more times" link, and you'll get another three, until you find a suitable one. Once you're happy with it, you click on the "Schedule It!" button, and Presdo will automatically add an event on your calendar and the one of your party. That's it. Pure magic!
The reason why I like Presdo is that it does not assume that you will use it as default calendar. Instead, it works with the calendar you are already using, be it Outlook, Google Calendar, or anything else it's been integrated with. All it does is scheduling, but it does it really, really well, in less clicks than any other application we've looked at. It's also pretty smart at suggesting suitable times for meetings, based on a lot of constraints that can be added when using the standard application (not the custom one we're using for the conference). Now, make no mistake: the system only works as well as the parties' calendars are up to date. So here is my request to you faithful Office 2.0 convert: please logon to your office20.com Google Apps account, add all the sessions you're planning to attend, and mark as "Busy" all the time slots during which you will not be available. Then, schedule as many meetings as you can in order to get the most out of your participation to what promises to be the best Office 2.0 Conference ever.
Eric & Team: thank you so much! What you built is truly amazing.
While I have not tested Presdo for Office 2.0 needs, I have been using it to schedule time with business partners and friends, and I must say I like it. If it is 1:1 e-mail can do, but when you have a group, Presdo is fast, easy, and saves so much time. Go Eric!