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

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