MarkThisDate

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.

Immovator Cross Media Cafe: the new TV Guide

Yesterday I attended the Immovator Cross Media Cafe. The topic was: The New TV Guide or EPG (electronic program guide). Key word of the day: collaborative filtering.

Interesting to see what:

• Vincent Everts, PCZapper
• Marcel Houtman, Dag, Zie.nl
• Albert Treur, TSS
• Annelies Kaptein, Stoneroos
• Berend Jan Verheijen, Hoofd Nieuwe Media, BNN
• Carl Lunenborg, Programmabladen AKN, TVgids

had to say. From a technical standpoint everything is possible: combinations with Youtube, video/tv on demand, mobile devices, etc. Please visit all those sites above and see how different the solutions to the same problem are. What I found also interesting is that TV programs in my view are not only competing amongst themselves for viewers, they are competing for precious time of the viewer. The viewer could also do some sports, read a book or visit grandma. My point is: in the examples I saw yesterday there was not one EPG that interacted with the calendar of the viewer. When am I going the watch all those collaboratively filtered programs? The solutions could be so simple as an ics feed for you favorite program, channel, actor or any collaboratively filtered (3 times is too much, I agree) content to your calendar app. Not only a good service to the visitor/viewer but also a perfect way to tell the viewer more about the show he is about to see with links back to the EPG.
Good idea ?

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:

3000 calendars and counting

Since last Thursday we have indexed over 3000 calendars for you to add to your electronic calendar. The submission of Yahoo!’s NCAA Women’s basketball calendars did the trick. Sports is the biggest category but holidays and business calendars are also very popular. We are working on some much needed interaction improvements.

Voetbalkrant.com partners with MarkThisDate.com

We teamed up with voetbalkrant.com, Belgium largest online football portal. Voetbalkrant now uses our functionality to distribute events and content to calendars, creating an excellent service to their visitors and creating thousands of contact moments with those visitors. All European football leagues are ‘equipped’ with our features (eg the English premier league). This time we used an XML interface between our and the servers of Voetbalkrant so all data are always up to date.

Partnership with Calgoo

We entered a partnership with Calgoo. Calgoo Software is dedicated to providing software to simplify calendars and schedules for people, families and businesses. Their solutions foster harmony and simplicity by making sense of the calendars, schedules and events at work, home and everywhere else.

All our public calendars can now be added to Calgoo via our calendar download list on MarkThisdate.com and via partner sites.

Redesign launched

We put a lot of effort in a new design and some new functionalities. The most visible is the updated homepage based on the country you are from. So from now you’ll be presented with the latest and most popular calendars from your country. Also today’s events are displayed.

Other changes include:

• We changed color settings based on this color scheme from Colourlovers.com.
• We added stats to the calendar detail pages. You can see to which application the calendar was downloaded and when.
• We added a creator tab to the calendar detail page showing which calendar the creator add and how popular they are.
• We added xml upload options for mass calendar additions.

Heineken International uses MarkThisDate

We are very proud to announce that Heineken added our publish widget to their international homepage. Heineken let’s visitors, analysts and other interested parties add annual shareholders meetings, analyst meetings and press announcements with the push-of-a-button to their calendar. With doing so the interested parties get access to livestreams, presentation and podcasts of these sessions all through their calendars. This is a great example of calvertising.

And the winners are ….

….. not us. Although we didn’t win one of the Dutch Web 2.0 Award we had a great time Friday night. Of course congrats to all the winners (Zoom, Buurtlink, Google, Netvibes, Hyves, eBuddy) and many thanks to the people that voted for us.

We have got the whole world in our hands

As mentioned in this post our partnership with bank-holidays.com has been expanded…..with the world. You can now download all holidays from any country (and a lot of regions within that country) in the world to your calendar. Soon our functionality will be available through the bank-holidays website. Did you eg know that today (17/1/2007) is Cook’s Possession Day in South Georgia?? Well now you do