MarkThisDate

Nu.nl adds MarkThisDate calendar widget to Tour de France special

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

Always know when your favourite artists play with Festivalkalenders.nl

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

Add Public Calendars as a guest

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.

MarkThisDate nominated for ‘Gouden Inhaakmedaille’

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.

Launch of Mooiesportzomer.nl

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.

Calendar widgets

We pimped our calendar widget. Not only is it extremely easy to implement (copy/past a hyperlink), the screen that opens is completely customizable to everybody’s needs and look and feel.

Just visit the share tab on a calendar page, select your code and copy and paste it into your website. We have prefab buttons but you can put the code under a hyperlink or your own banner or button.

Below is one of my favorite implementations (click the image). Every time a visitor of your website adds this schedule to his calendar he will be happy because you made his life so much easier and you have generated 35 contact moments (one for every match) with that visitor. In these contact moments you can give the visitor extra information about the event, your website or your product. Therefore you know he will revisit your site.

You can find more info and examples at our products page.

Friday relaunch MarkThisDate

We are very excited about our new and more intuitive look and feel coming out this Friday. We have also added lots of new features for our partners and clients. Please visit MarkThisDate.com on Friday and let us know what you think. Here is a preview:

Hiptop/Sidekick up and running

We made some tweaks to our Hiptop/Sidekick import functionality. Now you can upload any calendar into your Hiptop in your own timezone. For instructions check here. Thanks for helping us out with testing.

Hiptop/Sidekick help needed

We are testing some new functionality which let’s Hiptop/Sidekick users import our calendars. we need some help. If you are a Hiptopper/Sidekicker and want to help us out with a couple of simple tests please comment to this post or send an email to info @ markthisdate.com

Make your RSS reader a calendar?

Ever thought about using your RSS reader as a calendar. Why not? MarkThisDate.com now provides you the option to export your favourite calendars to your favourite rss readers including Bloglines, Google Reader, Google Homepage, My AOL, My Yahoo, My MSN, Rojo, Pageflakes, Newsgator, Netvibes and Windows Live.

Any other requests?