I’m really pleased to round out our judging panel for the Presdo Contest with Mike Maples, Jr.

Mike is the managing partner of Maples Investments, a new generation of VC firms here in Silicon Valley changing the way venture investments are done.  Among other notable companies, Maples Investments is an investor in Twitter and Digg.  Before becoming a full-time investor, Mike himself was an entrepreneur in his own right.  Mike co-founded Motive, the world’s leading broadband software company that successfully went IPO in 2004.  He also had executive roles at Tivoli Systems and Silicon Graphics.  Interestingly, Mike began his technology career in high school, when he started a software company that developed games and educational products for the original IBM PC. He has been passionate about the technology industry ever since.

I’m told that Mike is always too busy for his own good, to the point that he doubles or triple books his schedule.  Hopefully, Presdo can help him with that!  So we’re especially delighted that he is willing to spare a few minutes of his time to join us for the contest.

Eric Ly
Founder/CEO, Presdo

Our illustrious panel of judges for the Presdo Contest continues with Bob Walsh.

Many of you know Bob from the posts he has written on emerging web technologies and companies at the WebWorkerDaily blog.  He also runs the popular Joel on Software Business of Software forum.  But those are only his part-time jobs.  Bob has been a longtime software developer, the only person on our panel who actually codes.  We respect that.  Bob runs 47hats.com a consulting service for microISVs and startups.  The company provides consulting services to startups while building a Ruby on Rails training SaaS site for startups.  Bob is an author of two books, Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality and Clear Blogging: How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them.

Bob told me that he is generally interested in tools and techniques that help people cope with an information overloaded world, which is why we certainly appreciate his interest in Presdo.  With all his experience, Bob is going to be able to tell us which of the contest entries will truly help cut down on the information overload problem, which is something we are all interested in.

We are really happy to have Bob involved with the contest!

Eric Ly
Founder/CEO, Presdo

Many of you have written in and asked for more time to finish and submit you contest entries, so we have decided to extend the deadline for the Presdo iPhone 3G Contest.  We are extending the contest deadline to August 1, and winners will be decided August 22.

For those who have submitted or plan to submit entries by the original deadline, we want to make sure we honor your punctuality.  If you submit an entry by the original deadline, which is this Friday, July 18, and you win an iPhone 3G, we will also include a new Jawbone Bluetooth headset with your iPhone 3G.  It’ll go great with the phone.

We appreciate everyone’s interest in the contest, and continue to look forward to your creations.

To our Presdo Contest contestants, several have written in to us just the last couple days with questions about the Contest.  When you ask a question, please make sure your email address is included on the contact form.  Otherwise, we have no way of answering your questions.

And we’d certainly like to help you with your brilliant ideas!

Out of the many possible experts we could have chosen to be involved with the Presdo Contest, Allen Blue is truly a gem in my book.

Allen is a co-founder of LinkedIn and leads the company as its Vice President, Product Strategy.  I have worked with Allen for several years at LinkedIn, and I have never met anyone with more sharp and insightful judgment on product decisions than Allen.  I credit LinkedIn’s successful product largely because of Allen’s persistent, focused vision for it.

LinkedIn has announced APIs and OpenSocial integration, so Allen’s definitely been thinking about web service APIs and the myriad possibilities for them!

We are absolutely thrilled to have Allen, along with Ben Metcalfe, as judges for the contest.

The remaining judge will be announced soon!

Eric Ly
Founder/CEO, Presdo

There’s just one week left now before the deadline to submit entries for the Presdo iPhone 3G Contest.  The deadline is this Friday, July 18.  It has been great talking to contestants and enthusiastic Presdo users while receiving very creative entries!

Remember, Presdo will be awarding not one but three very slick iPhone 3Gs to people who come up with great mashups, deemed to be winning of course by our illustrious judging panel.

If you are think you’ve got what it takes to win, there’s no better time than now to charge up those creative juices and spending a couple hours on your idea.  Your audience awaits you.

Check out the contest details, and the Presdo API, and get rolling.

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.