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.
Everybody a very happy and healthy 2009! We are very proud to have facilitated over 130.000 calendar downloads in 2008. Outlook XP/2003 is still the most popular calendar but gCal, iCal and Outlook 2007 are catching up. The most popular category is still sports followed by holidays.
In 2009 we will launch 2 new initiatives; related to but very different from MarkThisDate.com:
Cheers,
The MarkThisDate team
Today at the Dutch National Publisher’s Conference, MarkThisDate presented itself as one of five innovative publishing concepts. This short ‘pitch’ turned out to be a competition which, in all modesty, we just had to win. 
Not only did the panel of professionals immediately recognize the power of Calvertising and the commercial promise of MarkThisDate.com, but in the end the entire public chose us as the most (potentially) successful concept.
Of course the “grand prize” was nothing more than recognition of our work, which is always appreciated. Cheers!