The question is one that we have asked ourselves many, many times and we view it as a question specific to how a company markets its product.  We’re aware that there are many people who are very happy to exchange either their privacy or security in exchange for a free service. We view unsolicited advertising as an invasion of privacy on the basis that most companies that offer free applications in exchange for free services are also selling private data collected from their customer base, without the customers knowing about it. Even in cases where it is spelled out in the terms and conditions, very few people actually read and are aware of what they are giving up in exchange for free services.

We also hold the opinion that there are not any other services on the market that can accomplish the task that MeetingMade performs and therefore, it represents a value proposition that is unique to the market. This may be considered a subjective statement however; our research on the competition has supported this opinion. 

At the end of the day, we know that our application and our pricing will not fit the needs of everyone and so if it doesn’t work for you, we understand. Again, we appreciate your time and interest in the application and we invite you to try MeetingMade out for 30 days free to see if it indeed, represents a valued service for you and your business.

Just today, Vince posted an interview at Smart Planet,  conducted with me from last week where we discussed what MeetingMade is, what it does, how it saves people time as well as a general discussion about meetings, busienss, and entrepreneurship.

Check it out, it’s entitled, “Does scheduling meetings feel like herding cats?”

So, how much is your time worth?

I get asked that question a lot, especially when speaking to others who have or have had successful consulting practices. As a culture, we even like to break down large sums of money into ‘hourly wages’ just to try and make them more tangible. Kevin Garnett, the highest paid player in the NBA earns about $129,000 an hour. Putting a huge number, like his annual salary of $27,500,000, into smaller bits can make it easier for us to comprehend.

I can’t claim to make as much as KG but in my world, I can say that an hour or two of my time is worth more than a fancy meal, a night at a nice hotel, or even a quick flight to Las Vegas.

MeetingMade personally saves me between two and three hours a month. I have heard claims [from our competition] of ‘hundreds of hours saved a year’ which is very hard to believe. I actually tracked the time I spent scheduling meetings from January 1, 2007 through to December 31, 2007 and spent a total of 32.25 hours scheduling meetings the traditional way. In 2008, I used MeetingMade, and saw that number get reduced down to about eight. Since my time is worth considerable more per hour than what we will charge for this application, we feel that the value proposition is pretty strong.

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[1] 2008 The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life By Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd

• MeetingMade at WebWorkerDaily
• MeetingMade at CNN

If you haven’t had an opportunity to try MeetingMade, have a look at a screencast put together by Simon Mackie demonstrating just how easy it is to schedule a meeting with MeetingMade.

Server virtualization is in its infancy. I think it is perfectly appropriate and, in fact, desirous of large enterprise to not only be wary at this point, but to adopt a wait and see approach.

It is certain difficult to sell the cloud to large E. However, SaaS and Cloud are apples and oranges; you can eat an apple, each an orange, or make yourself a fruit bowl.

Against the odds and industry naysayers, Red Wolf Online has been very successful selling our SaaS solutions (the ‘OnDex Knowledge Management System’ in particular) into the highly regulated insurance and financial services sectors.

There is reason for legitimate frustration when it comes to discovering the perfect calendar management system that is all the more remarkable given the number of meeting scheduling platforms available at present on the market. Here are a few additional points of criticism to add to a list of discontents when it comes to finding the right meeting scheduling tool:

The Shortcomings of Tungle:

· Tungle is dependent on software to sync with other devices. Tungle embeds images in .ics files which can cause Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, etc. to disable meeting requests or filter them as junk mail.

· The .ics files in Tungle are not formatted properly. The meeting details are garbled and the email addresses of users who respond to meeting requests must be manually added to .ics files.

· Tungle forgets to close the communication loop after confirming a meeting, resulting in potential confusion among meeting participants. Tungle fails to track or confirm the final confirmation of meeting participants.

· Tungle spoofs or impersonates the role of a meeting organizer. The organizer of a meeting subsequently cannot add events to their own calendar or receive responses to meeting requests.

· Tungle is overly dependent on AJAX for its functionality resulting in slower performance.

· The meeting organizer module in Tungle determines meeting times by merely eliminating “busy” times from “free” times. Tungle does not broker or negotiate meeting times.

The Shortcomings of TimeBridge:

· TimeBridge offers only up to 5 time slots in a given meeting scheduling session.

· Similar to Tungle in functionality, TimeBridge spoofs or impersonates the role of the meeting organizer. The organizer of a meeting subsequently cannot add events to their own calendar or receive responses to meeting requests.

· TimeBridge has a cluttered interface and lacks any useful HELP documentation. No instructions are provided.

· The meeting organizer module in TimeBridge determines meeting times by merely eliminating “busy” times from “free” times. TimeBridge does not broker or negotiate meeting times.

Meeting Made is the perfect meeting scheduling tool overcoming all these limitations.

MeetingMade is free to try and makes it easy to reliably propose and reschedule meeting times in real time. MeetingMade is the only web-based meeting scheduling tool that properly negotiates the best meeting time for everyone.

Save yourself the frustration and let MeetingMade broker and schedule your meetings for you.

MeetingMade adapts itself to the time zone of a user automatically. For example, if a meeting organizer is free at noon EDT and another meeting invitee is free at 9 AM PDT, MeetingMade recognizes a successfully coordinated meeting and generates a meeting request relative to the respective time zones of each meeting participant. If a meeting participant changes time zones prior to the meeting, the meeting request would automatically coordinate across time zones and adjust itself to the appropriate time.

Achieving simplicity in the front end often requires greater complexity in the back end.

MeetingMade stores all dates and times in a database in GMT and uses the GMT offset of a browser to localize the presentation of dates for each user. Meeting Requests (.ics files) from Meeting Made are encoded in GMT and work with the platform (i.e., iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile devices, Gmail and Calendar, Hotmail, Outlook, etc) accessing Meeting Made to effectively determine the appropriate time zone for each meeting participant.

Try an elegant solution for the coordination of time zones when scheduling your meetings.

MeetingMade is the only meeting scheduling tool that actually negotiates an optimal meeting time.

Meeting scheduling tools on the market are all variations of an enterprise scheduling mechanism that determines available meeting times by mashing up “free” or “busy” calendar alternatives in a process of elimination. Most meeting scheduling tools simply remove options as each participant logs in and deselects times from the Meeting Organizer’s original settings.

Only MeetingMade properly negotiates the best meeting time for everyone.  

Meeting Made uses a mathematical progression algorithm for dynamically calculating the ideal meeting time. A cascading system of hash tables reduces the complexity of calculating the optimal meeting time from an exponential formulation to a polynomial expression that handles indeterminates or meeting participant variables such as “partial attendance” and “different time zones”.

Distinct from all other meeting scheduling tools, MeetingMade uses technology designed for negotiating multiple meeting participant variables in determining the best meeting time for everyone. 

The computational algorithm of MeetingMade is what enables it to scale up and down accommodating anywhere from 2 to 50 meeting participants. These are functions not available with any other meeting scheduling tool. MeetingMade is the only solution that does not require any software to automatically synch to devices, web services and email programs. This functionality is also not available using any other meeting scheduling tool.

Only MeetingMade helps individuals and groups easily negotiate the ideal meeting time in real time.