We’re very pleased and excited to announce the first judge for the Presdo iPhone 3G Contest, Ben Metcalfe.

For those who don’t know Ben, he currently advises MySpace on their platform, including their integration with Google OpenSocial.  Ben also works with Seesmic, a video conversation startup headed by Loic Le Meur.  Before becoming involved with these companies, Ben also worked at the BBC in London for six years, including helping to setup and run their developer network BBC Backstage.  Ben is the co-founder and lead consultant of Swordfish Corp, which specializes in providing companies with strategic advice around open platforms and developer networks.

We’re really excited to have Ben as a judge because of his extensive experience on having worked on so platforms, especially as it applies to social media and social networks.  He’s going to keenly judge the potential of our contestant’s entries and help select the most deserving winners.

More judges will be announced soon.

Eric Ly
Founder/CEO, Presdo

Have you ever wanted to let a friend know that you were going to be late for a meeting, but you didn’t have their phone number handy?  How about calling your friend to get the best directions to their new place but realizing you didn’t have their number?  What if you planned an important meeting and somebody hasn’t arrived?

With Presdo’s new phone number feature, you can let friends know where to call you when there’s a problem during events.  You can easily find their phone numbers too.  Here’s how.

Go to your settings page and type in the phone number where you want to be reached.

Presdo takes care of the rest.  When you are invited to an event by someone and agree to attend, they see your phone number when hovering over your name on the event.

Your number is now shared with them anytime they plan another event with you.

Similarly, when you organize an event on Presdo, your phone number is automatically shared with all of your guests.

If you save Presdo events to your calendar, phone numbers are also included in the event details.

Easy enough?  Enter your phone number now.

The next time you organize an event with Presdo, encourage your friends to enter their phone number so you can reach them if needed.

If you want to save your own number into Presdo for future events and haven’t signed up for Presdo yet, it only takes a minute to sign up.

For many of us, a lot of time is spent on the phone talking to other people. Why not use Presdo to schedule these calls? Presdo isn’t just for face-to-face meetings. We’ve recently added an enhancement that makes it easy to schedule phone calls, and to remember where to call.

Take a look:

If you enter the above into Presdo, for example, Presdo will automatically save the phone number into the WHERE field of your event so you and your guest know where to call when the time comes (or who should call who!).

You don’t always have to enter the phone number when first creating the event. If you don’t know the number yet, just enter it later into the same WHERE field of your event.

So, the next time you need to schedule that call to touch base with an old friend or a conference call with a group, check out this feature!

Today, we’re very delighted to announce the opening of the Presdo API, and the Presdo iPhone 3G Contest, both of which were released over the weekend!  More about the latter in a minute.

What does the Presdo API mean to us?  When we first launched Presdo, many users wrote in to ask if we were planning to release an API or an integration with their favorite productivity tool.  They recognized that Presdo helps them with an important activity that they already do, albeit not in a very good way today.  Presdo would help them do it much better if only it were easier to access.  More so than many other web apps, Presdo makes a lot of sense when it is embedded in the existing flows of the way people work.  We agreed.  Also, we mentioned at the beginning that we wanted to actively engage our users and community to create a great product together.  We also realize that we don’t have a lock on all the best ideas.

With the Presdo API, we wanted to enable not only a few integrations that we could do on our own.  We wanted to enable our users and developers to create many integrations at once.

Like our product, the initial Presdo API is simple.  (But we’d like to think it’s not simple-minded!)  In speaking with many developers over the last several months about a possible Presdo API, we realized that there were many capabilities we could build into the API, and in fact, we’ve envisioned much more capability than is currently available in the API.

So here’s a challenge to all of you who want to push Presdo to the next level.  We’d like to learn from you and to understand what you’d like to do in terms of integrating with Presdo.  If we like your ideas, we’ll be supporting you all the way.

To get the juices of innovation flowing, we are running a programming contest around the new API and awarding some great prizes from a company we greatly admire.  We will be announcing the judges shortly.  During the contest, we will also be enhancing the features of Presdo, and updates will be posted to this blog.  These enhancements may stoke your thinking about new potential applications with Presdo, so we encourage you to stay tuned to this blog for such announcements.

We hope that you’ll take us up on these opportunities to do something fantastic with Presdo.  We are really looking forward to it.

Today, we’re very excited to announce the Presdo iPhone 3G Contest. We will be releasing an API to Presdo in a few weeks, and we want to encourage smart and creative developers to help us come up with great ways to integrate Presdo into other tools they currently use.

As prizes, we will be giving away one or more of Apple’s unreleased iPhones 3G in exchange for great integrations.

Contest details will be announced at http://presdo.com/contest, so bookmark this page for details.

We are looking forward to your participation!

–Eric

In the last few weeks, we’ve had many great conversations with people about our company. I even had a great time meeting with the founder of a cool company called Presto.com.

It’s been very interesting to hear people say our name, Presdo, for the first time.

In spite of our desire to come up with a name which can be said the same by everybody around the world, using a made-up name like Presdo always runs the risk of unintended consequences.

So I am here to explain the origin of Presdo, and to settle once and for all how it should be pronounced. And have some fun too!

Presdo comes from the word presto. We like that the original word comes from magic tricks, in the same tradition as abracadabra and voila!. We also like that presto comes from music, which means to play the music “very fast”. These are great themes to be associated with, since our product is meant to be quick and provide a bit of magic to our users.

Oh, one more thing. Since Presdo is all about “do”ing things with other people, we don’t mind that the name mentions do too.

So, Presdo sounds like presto. That’s where the name comes from.

Oh, and it has one other meaning too… in another language besides English.

Feel free to tell us your favorite way to say Presdo!

One of the coolest features we don’t often get to talk about is the great way in which Presdo works with locations and events. Every time you create an event, you can save a location so everybody knows where to meet.

The Map link next to the address shows you on Google Maps where it is, and you can get directions too.

It’s very simple to enter a location when creating an event. If you already know it, you can just paste or type it in. Or better, you can also use Presdo’s location picker to recommend a place. When you’re creating or changing an event, just click Or, pick a location in the WHERE area.

You’ll see Presdo’s location picker.

We’d like to share some other tips with you for using it.

• You can change the type of places it shows by typing into the location picker’s Find box. For example, if you are looking for Japanese restaurants, try typing sushi to see nearby Japanese places. Of course, it’s not just limited to restaurants. Try typing AMC Theaters to find a nearby movie theater.

• You can also bookmark favorite areas to search. Click Near… and type a city like San Francisco or a zip code like 90210 to find places near these areas. The location picker will remember them so you can use them next time.

• When getting together with an out-of-touch friend or colleague who may have moved or changed jobs, how many times did you have to ask them, “where are you now”? Presdo makes finding a place near them easy. If your friends are already Presdo users, you can click on their names, like Near Cindy or Near Jake, to find locations near them. So, enter your own location into Presdo to be so invited, and encourage your friends to do so too!

• There’s even a convenient feature that finds locations about the same distance from everybody. Try clicking Near everyone to see what happens. Some people will ask, what happens if you’re in San Francisco and the other person is in New York? You’ll have to try it to see what happens!

–Eric

We’re very delighted to feature a new, tight three-minute video showing off the many cool features of Presdo!

It was recently created as part of a post about Presdo by DemoGirl, a blog that reviews new web software. DemoGirl makes learning about new web tools much more fun and exciting. Much better than looking at screenshots and reading FAQs to find out what a new product is about.

Just click over to watch the video.

We hope that after you watch it, you will sign up for Presdo and take it out for a spin.

Many thanks to DemoGirl for taking a few minutes to share Presdo in such an exciting way with the rest of us.

Thanks, DemoGirl!

At Presdo, we live by a few important standards when it comes to the product. “Incredibly cool” and “scary good” are two phrases often heard in the hallway when we ask ourselves if a new feature has lived up to our expectations.

Think about the last “incredibly cool” product you saw, or a “scary good” piece of work you recently heard about. There aren’t too many of them around. And the truth is, despite our trying to achieve this, it is difficult to live up to these demanding expectations every single day.

Yet, rather than talking about the people behind the product, I want to first talk about a group of people who became our early users and then went way beyond what we expected from them. Through their initiative and enthusiasm for Presdo, they gave us real advice, “tough love” feedback, and their encouragement.

On the days when we couldn’t quite achieve “incredibly cool” and “scary good”, they reminded us why it was so important to do so. They kept us honest. What we do here at Presdo is ultimately for our users’ benefit, and we hope that we have at least created something that is “incredibly cool” and “scary good” for them.

I want to thank the following people for their generosity in helping Presdo to become what it is today. You all earned my sincere thanks:

–Eric

I want to thank the many, many users who wrote in providing feedback on Presdo over the last few days. It’s fair to say that the response to Presdo has greatly exceeded our expectations, and because of you, Presdo gets better and better.

We’ve already made several enhancements to Presdo, including:

• We made it easier for people from international locations to use Presdo’s cool location features. If you’re coming from Europe or Asia, Presdo’s location features are working much better.
• Based on your feedback, we added more phrases that Presdo can now recognize. For example, Presdo now recognizes “in 2 weeks” or “in a couple weeks”, and so on.
• We also improved the general stability of Presdo in several areas.

Keep the great feedback coming!

–Eric