New Features, News and Updates
A happy new year! And what a year 201 0will be. The Olympics in Vancouver and the World cup in South Africa are definitely among our highlights. If you are already looking forward to your next holiday make sure to add the holidays of your region or country to your calendar. Mark your calendar and miss nothing.
Just one and a half month from now and the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver start. Personally I’m looking forward to the speedskating, which starts on Februari 13th. If you don’t want to miss out on any of the sports (Icedancing, skiing, curling (also a favorite), hockey, luge, figure skating, biathlon, snowboarding, short track, ski jump, bobsleigh, etc) visit the MarkThisDate download page and add the schedule to your calendar.
We get a lot of questions regarding the workings of iCal files (.ics). iCal files are the food for calendar apps. Calendar apps understand these files as having event related information in them (compare browser and .html). If you want to compose your own ics file first read the RFC. If you have written your ics file make sure to run it by the iCal validator. After you ran the validator and still have problems or questions don’t hesitate to contact us.
From all of us here at MarkThisDate, we want to wish you a merry Christmas. To shoot off well prepared into the new year don’t forget to add your holiday calendar to your favourite calendar app.
As always you find the most important calendars first at MarkThisDate. The world cup football 2010 is held in South Africa from June 11th till July 11th. If you don’t want to miss a game add the schedule to your calendar (Outlook, iCal, Gcal, iPhone, Lotus Notes etc) or phone (Update: and here is the Dutch version). We’ll make the schedule per country and group available as soon as possible. In 2006 the world cup was held in Germany. That calendar was downloaded around 30.000 times. Let’s see if we can beat that number. So spread the word or use our widget by copying the following code to your website:
<a href=’http://www.markthisdate.com/calendar/World_Cup_Football_Complete_Match_Schedule_2010_South_Africa_10041/toevoegen-aan-agenda.html?language=1′ onClick=’window.open(“http://www.markthisdate.com/calendar/World_Cup_Football_Complete_Match_Schedule_2010_South_Africa_10041/toevoegen-aan-agenda.html?language=1&css=share”, “AddToCalendar”, “height=445,width=595,scrollbars=1,location=0,screenX=350,screenY=50,top=50,left=350″); return false;’><img src=’http://www.markthisdate.com/assets/images/button-widget-big.png’ border=’0′/></a>
Without noticing we passed the 10.000 calendar mark on October 19th. We could and should have made a big deal out of it but unfortunately I just noticed. The honour goes to a 4th division Belgian Soccer team. Currently we have over 1500 calendars live; 8500 did their job and went to calendar heaven.
If you have a Twitter account, be sure to follow us @markthisdate
Our goal has always been to serve people with the right information at the right
MarketDrums.com
time. MarkThisDate.com was and is a service that does just that. About a year ago we took it one step further with SchedJoules.com, our event distribution platform that distributes time related information to people when they want it and how they want it via calendars but also email, sms, rss and instant messenger. Now we applied this concept to financial and company news. MarketDrums.com brings real-time and complete news about companies from the world’s most reliable sources like Dow Jones. When we say we bring the news we mean that. So no more looking around on websites or newspapers, all the news of the companies of you interest is brought to you (again) via email, rss , text message, in calendar, instant messenger and on desktop. Great for investors but also for professionals who want the know what is being said about their company, the competition or their clients. We do do not only bring current news but also future news: the company events. Currently we cover all major European stock markets and indices and we are looking into the US. So if you want to be the first to know about
on your investments, your company, your competitors or you clients check out MarketDrums.com and let us know what you think.
Last week we announced our first international broadcasting project. This week we are more than proud to post about our first broadcasting pilot in The Netherlands. As of last week fans of Green Wing and Graham Norton can add all episodes to their electronic calendars so they won’t miss a thing. These series are broadcasted on HumorTV, one of the digital channels of the VARA. Edwin Valent, Head of New Media at the VARA, writes on his personal blog that the most handy feature of this is that if something changes in the time of a broadcast this automatically changes in your calendar. If this pilot is successful the Vara will use this service more and try to connect it to the tv guide of the VARA.
You can subscribe to both Green Wing and Graham Norton at HumorTV.
At the beginning of 2009 we already posted about SchedJoules.com which is sort of the very (very, very) big brother of MarkThisDate. SchedJoules is our Event Distribution Platform and specialized in energizing event information (date, lokation, time, etc) by sending it to electronic calendars (Outlook, Gcal, iCal etc), mobile phones, instant messengers, email, rss, etc. What’s the difference then between MarkThisDate and SchedJoules? Well, MarkThisDate focuses primarily on relatively small one of a kind calendars like the match schedule of one team for one season or holidays for one country for a single year. The Event Distribution Platform SchedJoules focuses on large businesses and organizations or better to say on large databases with repeatedly changing events. We take time-based information as starting-point, choose the right medium matching the right kind of information and enable our clients to meet their goals of increasing customer loyalty and revenue growth.
Launch Canal+
About three weeks ago we launched SchedJoules together with C More Entertainment which is the rights holder of the TV broadcasting brand Canal+ in the Nordic countries Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. The reason they came to us is because they wanted to bring better attention to their various TV channels, increase customer loyalty and also create opportunities to grow revenues. Distributing their Electronic Program Guide to electronic calendars would just do all those things so we hooked them on to our platform and now their viewers can very easily add a lot of series, movies and sports matches to their electronic calendars like Outlook, iCal and Google Calendar. For the C Sports website for instance people can watch live matches by paying per view. People can add these live matches to their calendars and all items contain deeplinks to the specific page where a match is broadcasted. This way C Sports stimulates the number of people watching a match by serving the right content at the right time in the right place. Excellent, I would say! The new service is accepted very well. Users love to have their favorite series in their calendar. Check out the Canal+ Sweden website for a live example of SchedJoules in action.
