March 2nd, 2009 by Wilfred
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.
February 25th, 2009 by Wilfred
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.
January 21st, 2009 by Wilfred
Recently the monthly pay dates of student grants and loans were added to MarkThisDate so students exactly know when they can run to the supermarket to buy food because they got money again (ah, those were the days 
. Now we found out that the IB-groep (The Informatie Beheer Groep is responsible for the execution of several acts and regulations, such as student grants and information management in the Netherlands) also thinks that it’s a good idea for students to add these dates to their calendar so they added our widget to their website. It’s nice to see that after 6 years of receiving grants and loans from them we can return the favour!
October 8th, 2008 by Wilfred
We have developed an Outlook XP and 2003 add-in! If you’re a user of one of these applications and you install this little application you can now subscribe to calendars instead of downloading them once. The greatest benefit of this is that you’re always up to date with your favorite events because you can set automatic updates every 15 minutes, every day or even once a week.
And now we’re looking for Beta Testers. Of course we’ve tested it ourselves extensively so you won’t be our first guinea pig!
So, do you use Outlook XP or Outlook 2003 and do you want to test our add-in? Sign up below and we’ll send you our extremely secret Outlook add-in download url and an explanation of how the add-in works.
Everybody can now subscribe to calendars with the
MarkThisDate Outlook add-in.
Thanks,
The team of MarkThisDate
September 15th, 2008 by Wilfred
Microsoft is finally following the path of Google Calendar with their Windows Live Calendar beta. All calendars on MarkThisDate.com can now also be added directly to Windows Live Calendar beta. They’re not there yet, especially talking to their support people is like pushing thick mud through a tiny funnel. But all in all, if you used to be a big Hotmail fan and now really dig Windows Live this is absolutely a great calendar to use! If you want to follow the progress they make check out their blog.
Oh, and make sure that you get your settings right in order to handle timezones correctly. This is what Mechell says over at the Windows Live Calendar Beta Technical Support: “…. in order to reconcile the time zone settings on your calendar, you must have the same time zone settings with your Windows Live ID account and Windows Live Calendar Beta. To verify and set the time zone setting for your Windows Live ID account, visit account.live.com.”
July 9th, 2008 by Wilfred
Last weekend was the start of Tour de France. Together with tour.nusport.nl, one of the specials of Nu.nl, we launched a special Tour de France widget so visitors of tour.nusport.nl can add all stages to their calendar. 
The ‘special’ thing is that we extended our widget. It now not only shows an add-to-calendar button but also the next 5 stages. This number of stages that are shown is arbitrary of course. We can also show 10, 15 or all stages for instance. The greatest thing of this extended widget is that we now also unlock the events itself and open the door for:
a. companies and websites that have events but do not show them on their website at this moment; and
b. companies that want to add other than their own events to their website
May 19th, 2008 by Wilfred
Today we launched Festivalkalenders.nl, our second spinoff aimed at a specific target group. In this case our target group are the visitors of the major summer festivals like Pinkpop and North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland and Belgium. In most cases these festivals last for days with a lot of different stages on which artists perform.
Of course you don’t take your laptop to a festival but when you sync your electronic calendar with you mobile phone as i do, the complete program of a festival is added to your phone in the blink of an eye and always with you during the festival. Quite handy if you would ask me!
Check it all out at www.festivalkalenders.nl
April 28th, 2008 by Wilfred
As of today you can add calendars to MarkThisDate without registering first. Just send us the publicly available calendar address and the calendar will be added under the user ‘guest’. If you want to add calendars by submitting your events manually or you want to get credits for you calendar entry you still have to register first.
April 24th, 2008 by Wilfred
Strating (Active Marketing) is again organizing the so called ‘inhaakawards ‘or ‘hook on awards’ around the major sporting events in 2008, the Olympics in Beijing and UEFA EURO 2008 in Austria and Switzerland. An expert jury judges on originality in the categories Newspapers/Print, Radio/TV, Internet and SP/Instore. We’re very proud to anounce that we are nominated for a ‘Gouden Inhaakmedaille’ in the category Internet for our spin-off Mooiesportzomer.nl. On this website visitors can very easily add all match schedules of the three major sportevents of this summer (EURO 2008, Tour de France and OS) to their calendars. MarkThisDate is nominated next to companies like Nuon, Lotto en Rexona. If you like our spin-off go to the website click on ‘Inhakers EK 2008′ and vote for Mooiesportzomer.nl.
April 14th, 2008 by Wilfred
Last Friday we launched a nice spinoff of MarkThisDate. For EURO 2008 in June, the Tour de France in July and the Olympics 2008 in Beijing in August the event schedules can now also be found on Mooiesportzomer.nl.
We are planning on implementing more of these theme websites. For instance one with the line ups (including start en end times and stage locations) of the summer festivals in Holland. If you have suggestions for other theme websites, or want to start a theme website in collaboration with us just contact us or respond here.