After delivering sync with Google Calendar a couple weeks ago, what other love can we give for Google?

How about this? Would you like to be able to use Presdo without signing up for it first? We’ve heard from many of you who say that with so many web services today, you have to sign up before you can use them. It takes time, we know, in this fast ‘tweeting world.

To save you the time so you can get to the good stuff in Presdo, we’ve added the ability to sign in with Google. (In technical jargon, we added support for OpenID.) Now, you won’t need to sign up first to use Presdo.

On Presdo’s sign in box or sign up page, just opt to sign in with Google instead. Presdo will redirect you to a Google page where you give Presdo permission to use your sign in. Seconds later, you’ll be brought back to Presdo as a full-fledged user ready to go.

Best of all, it works with both regular Google and Google Apps accounts. That was easy.

Be sure to join us at the GTD Summit in San Francisco, which starts today through Friday.  The GTD Summit brings together many people to focus on this period of immense change and new opportunities in our lives, highlighting new approaches around GTD being applied to accelerate productivity in our lives and work.

Presdo CEO Eric Ly will be participating on the following panels to discuss the future of GTD:

• A GTD Workforce – Is There a New Industry Standard – Thursday, 1:30 to 3pm
• The Virtual Workplace – Does it Work? – Thursday, 3:30 to 5pm
• Productivity Tech: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – Friday, 12:45 to 2:15pm

Since tools are our specialty, we look forward to the great insights about how technology can be made to help us all achieve the ideals of GTD.

We invite you to join these sessions and add to the lively debates.  See you there!

Presdo is looking for a few good engineers to join its team.  Looking at all the things we wanted to do this year, we decided we need help.  We’re planning to invest to take our product to the next level.

If you’re passionate about building great products with a great team of people, you’ve come to the right place. Check out our job posting on LinkedIn.

We are looking for talent in other areas too.  If you are an entrepreneurial product manager or product designer, drop us a note.

On March 11-13, the first-ever GTD Summit will take place in San Francisco, and noted speakers such as David Allen, Guy Kawasaki and James Fallows will be headlining the conference.  I’ve been invited to participate in the Summit and join several panels.

No doubt, many Presdo users are already familiar with GTD and its approach toward productivity, and many of our colleagues swear by it.  The whole idea behind writing things down and prioritizing as tasks come our way helps us focus on the most important things.

At Presdo, we are especially concerned about helping people organize their time.  Besides having spirited discussions about GTD and the technologies used to support GTD, I’ll have the opportunity to talk about how Presdo helps those who want to take advantage of GTD principles.

One of the several ways Presdo helps is by enabling people to “write things down” for meetings even if the time for them is still unknown.  For example, take a look at our “no time” event feature.  With this feature, you can make a note to yourself to meet with someone or a group of people at some point in the future, even if you don’t know exactly when.  Then, when there’s an opportune time to meet, schedule the event and send the event to them.

At the Summit, I’ll be showing more examples of how Presdo can be used to productively get things done.

If you haven’t registered for the Summit, contact us and receive a discount off the registration.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

Eric Ly
Founder, CEO
Presdo

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

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

For the last few months, we’ve been adding many features to Presdo that users have been asking for.  This week, we’re happy to announce the addition of a very useful enhancement that many have suggested—the ability to add web links inside the WHAT and messages of Presdo events.  Take a look!

Just paste in URLs from elsewhere and share other web pages with your guests!  It works as you’d expect.  ‘Nuff said.

Presdo will be participating in the Office 2.0 Conference this week in San Francisco.  We are not only one of the companies proudly sponsoring the conference, but we were also invited to provide a way for conference participants to schedule private meetings quickly and easily.  We are very excited to showcase Presdo’s technology there.

Several years ago, the phrase “Office 2.0″ was termed by Ismael Ghalimi, Office 2.0 Conference’s organizer.  It’s a great concept whose time is certainly coming.  Office 2.0 encompasses the spirit of simple, web-based, productivity applications that enable people to be more productive than ever before.  Already, companies like Google, Zoho and Salesforce.com are reinventing conventional productivity software into novel forms designed for the Internet age, and even new applications which are only possible because of the Internet as an underlying platform are starting to appear.

At Presdo, we resonate with many of these ideas, and we are excited to support Office 2.0.  If you’ve successfully planned a team lunch using Presdo, why not try using Presdo to schedule that next board meeting?  Why not?

And if you happen to be coming to the Office 2.0 Conference, please find and come talk to us.  Schedule a time using some novel Presdo functionality we are providing exclusively at the conference!

Update: What a success.  We were camped out at Office 2.0 in the large room where many of the Presdo-scheduled meetings took place.  It was heartening to see so many people meeting up there, knowing that we contributed in a small way to enable these meetings to happen hassle-free.

With more than 400 attendees at this conference, people used Presdo to schedule almost 70 one-on-one meetings.  Some of the more well-known companies such as Google had more meetings than others, and we turned on some new features that will be coming to the core product soon!

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