Today, we’re very pleased to announce that Ismael Ghalimi has agreed to join to our board of advisors and help us take Presdo to the next level.

Ismael is a well-known entrepreneur and executive here in Silicon Valley.  He is founder and CEO behind Intalio, the leader in the business process management (BPM) software platforms.  Besides being a passionate entrepreneur, Ismael is also a fervent industry leader and advocate in applying Web 2.0 technologies to business productivity.  Ismael writes a well-respected blog about business productivity, and he also created the Office 2.0 conferences.

I met Ismael several years ago when I was at LinkedIn.  Since then, I have gotten to know him through many conversations we’ve had on business and technology topics.  Ismael brings a great blend of strategy and entrepreneur passion to the table.  He has an uncanny ability to cut through the noise of everyday to distill inspiring yet actionable visions of the future.  His perspective will no doubt be great for business users of Presdo, for whom we intend to do much more.

Ismael and I have been discussing his involvement in Presdo over the last couple months, and we couldn’t be happier that he agreed to help out.

We both know that the challenge of Presdo is great, but so is our promise.  With Ismael’s help, we look forward to doing many great things for Presdo.

Eric Ly
Founder, CEO
Presdo

Do you travel?  Need to schedule an event during your trip that’s in another time zone?  Presdo now has much improved support for handling events in different time zones.

Let’s say you’re on the west coast, and you plan to travel to the east coast for a business trip.  You need to schedule a meeting for 10am EST with a business partner on the east coast.

Forget about having to do the math.  Just type “10am EST” when creating the event.  Presdo creates an event with a time of 10am, but the time will be 10am east coast time instead of 10am west coast time.  The event’s time zone is also set to the east coast time zone, which means all exchanges about times with your guest will be interpreted relative to east coast time.

If you are tracking multiple events with Presdo, and you have other events in west coast time and now a new event on east coast time, take a look at your upcoming events page:

See how Presdo keeps track of times in different time zones for you instead of confusingly shifting the times like on some calendars?

Presdo recognizes time zone designators after times, and it works for both US and worldwide time zones, including designators like “GMT+1″.

And there are a couple more ways to set an event’s time zone:

• Pick one from the time editor on the event page.  You can see a list of time zones for all worldwide locations.

• Pick a location for the event.  If the location is in another time zone, the event’s time zone is automatically changed to the time zone at the location.  It’s very cool.

While designators like “EST” are convenient for setting the time zone, they aren’t unique worldwide, so use the other ways if typing the designator isn’t working out for you.

There’s more information in our help on time zone support.

Can it get any easier?  Let us know!

A very happy new year to all of our loyal Presdo users.

This past year has been a very interesting year for our company.  The most important milestone was the launch of our product to the general public.  We had a lot to celebrate and to be proud of, and certainly, we are thankful for your interest and support of our company.

Recently, everybody has been talking about how the economic environment has made things more difficult on everyone.  Some of you may even be wondering if Presdo has “what it takes” to survive these difficult economic conditions.

I want to assure you that we are here to stay for the long term to fulfill the vision of helping people organize their time.  Given the reaction we have received over the last few months, we are convinced more than ever about the long-term value we will deliver.

From the beginning, we have prided ourselves in doing things differently.  In fact, since the time Presdo was launched, we received a great deal of feedback from you and learned a lot about how to make the product even better.  We have planned more than a full roadmap of enhancements for 2009.  And we will start talking about them soon on our blog.

This blog has been quiet the last few months.  (Hope we’ve been missed.)   But our team has been working long hours to set the stage for some major enhancements.  Some of the changes are already visible, while most are underneath the surface.  You’ll see the benefits of this work soon.

So from all of us, we want to wish you a very successful 2009.  And through Presdo, we look forward to making your life just a bit easier in the new year!

Eric Ly
Founder, CEO
Presdo