Tungle releases public beta, eases the pain of coordinating meeting (10)
Tungle, a local startup, is a plug-in for Outlook that allows its users to share their availability with the people they are working with; finding then a common free time is then immediate and pain-free. The product is targeted at large groups, in a business setting, where colleagues, managers, and assistants typically spend hours, days and countless emails to check back and forth if someone is avalaible.
Tungle works for the moment with MS Outlook, but if any of your collaborators don’t have Outlook, they can go to a “Tungle space”, a temporary web page where they will have the same functionnality.
Tungle’s founder is Marc Gingras, who on many occasions highlighted the ease of use of the product and the attention they gave to the user interface. There are many associations to be done here with Skype: Tungle is also a p2p application but instead of using technical or software-related words, it explains in very straightforward words what the tool means for end-users.
Meeting coordination tools is a competitive space: Timebridge especially has received acclaims for a solution that does the same thing, JiffleNow is another competitor which launched last week, although there is not (yet) a clear winner. It’s sure noone is going to use more than one tool to coordinate meeting times, and even if I know they spent more than one year developing & fine-tuning their product, it’s just the beginning of the battle for Tungle.
Another last factor to ake into account with Tungle is that it’s a peer-to-peer application. Good: it means it goes beyond firewalls, doesn’t need servers, and is scalable (or more easily scalable than tradtional architectures). The problem is that for the past 6 months, ISPs are doing whatever they can against the protocol. Comcast in the U.S is known to send “reset” packets to its subscribers, while Bell Canada and Rogers are throttling p2p traffic. Factor also into the equation the whole net neutrality debate and we’ve got challenging times ahead for any p2p application.
I wish though good luck to the team at Tungle; they certainly have one of the best tools in the category, and ultimately the atention to detail & work done with the user interface will certainly pay off in the long run.
[...] Montreal’s Tungle has lauched into a public beta and has received good coverage from Montreal Tech Watch (as you’d expect - Heri does such a good job of covering the local scene) and TechCrunch, [...]
I seriously doubt the extremely low bandwidth required by Tungle will be affected in any way by throttling or other measures by ISPs.
Tony,
ok, you might be right with about bandwidth, but p2p is not a protocol acknowledged by ISPs, and regardless of the application, there are a few of them that volunteerly blocks or disturbs p2p traffic.
http://www.scheduleonce.com is a simple alternative to Tungle. You use it for the real complex meetings and you dont need to register or download anything
I keep getting an “Unexpected service error. Please try again later.”
When i try to sign up :( Hopefully a sign they’re growing by leaps and bounds.
Hey Matt,
Sorry to hear about your issue using Tungle. We did have a big day yesterday, lots of interest! We haven’t experienced any downtime or server errors.
Our Help Center is available, if you’re still experiencing this issue - give us a ring,
http://www.tungle.com/Home/svc/SupportRequest
Or contact me directly, support@tungle.com
Jason Knudsen
Support Engineer
http://www.tungle.com
Thanks Jason - Problem seems to have corrected itself when I tried today.
[...] an online calendar scheduling service for teams (see previous article here), announced today a $5 million in series A funding led by CommonWealth Capital Ventures, with also [...]
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