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

We’re delighted by the coverage we received on TechCrunch today. Many thanks to Erick Schonfeld and the TechCrunch team for their posting.

We also received an overwhelming amount of feedback from users who read the post. We just want to let everyone know that we are working through the feedback as quickly as possible and we hope to get back to you as soon as we can.

At the end of the day, it’s all about whether you, our users, find what we’re doing valuable enough to continue to use it, so we hope that you’ll continue to write in after you’ve really used the tool and give us your feedback!

We are totally passionate and committed about making this a great product.

Let’s kick things off and start talking about one of the most interesting aspects of Presdo.

A lot of people ask: why did we choose to have only a text field on the home page and nothing else? For a web app that deals with dates and times, why isn’t there a calendar picker anywhere in Presdo’s user interface?

We went a different way with good reason, and here’s why: when people want to organize a get together, they often don’t have all the details about when, where, who, and so on, of the event. In fact, it’s a collaborative activity. People might have a set of dates and times they’d be willing to get together, but very often, they might just know a time of day they’d like to meet someone. Or, they know which day they’d like to meet but they are flexible about the time.

By using the text-based interface, Presdo lets people say as much–or as little–about the event as they want when creating events. We wanted to use this kind of ambiguity to enable a group of people to work out the best times.

Here are some examples:

• You can enter Monday with Phil into the home page, and Presdo assumes you want to meet Phil anytime on Monday. It will let him find a good time to meet you by suggesting other times on Monday in case Phil can’t make your “best time”.

• If you enter afternoon with Phil, Presdo assumes you’d like to meet Phil anytime in the afternoon over the next few days. You and Phil can work out the details about which day will be good for both of you.

• You can also offer a choice of times to people. For example, you can enter Monday 2pm, Tuesday 2pm, or Fri 2pm. That’s a lot to type, isn’t it? So, just type mon, tue or fri at 2:30pm.

• Presdo also understands a few convenient words like lunch, breakfast, and dinner to make it very easy to plan these kinds of events. If you type in lunch with Phil, Presdo assumes you’d like to plan a lunch with Phil over the next few days.

Several calendar programs also have text-based inputs. Most famously, Google Calendar has a “Quick Add” feature that lets you create appointments. Don’t be fooled!

Presdo is much more than that because you don’t have to be specific about the time. It uses this ambiguity to guide suggestions for you and your guests to fine tune the details.

So we hope you’ll try being ambiguous with your friends!

–Eric

A very warm welcome to you, our Presdo users, to the Presdo blog. We have some great things in store for Presdo, and we very much want you to take part in creating the future with us.

We want this blog to be a place where matters that are worthy to you are discussed, for example, topics concerning our product, the success our customers are having, reasons for important decisions we’ve made, and important industry trends impacting what we do. More on many of these topics in future postings.

Hopefully by now, you’ve tried out Presdo and you are curious about the people behind the product. It is a very small team.

Presdo was started not only to address a need that we all have but also to represent some important ideals about the way people build technology companies. All of us at Presdo use products we love and find indispensable. You and I probably agree on what many of these products are. The products that most excite us offer something refreshing while adding value to our lives. They make us feel good when we use them.

When we began Presdo, we set for ourselves not a modest challenge: can we bring useful and interesting products to market that are even better than the best products we admire? And in doing so, can we build a profitable company that enables us to continue to create value for our customers? These are important goals for us.

In my own experience, it is often difficult for any company–let alone a hungry startup–to stay true to its ideals while pursuing the profit motive, and vice versa. However, I firmly believe that the companies which have the good fortune to do both go on to become leaders in their industry, and as they say, change the world. In our “hungry” state of things today, we can certainly say that we hope to have the chance to do this.

It’s my genuine hope that you will engage us in the worthy discussions we will have here, and in other ways, at the start of our exciting journey. We are delighted that you are here!

–Eric