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March 10, 2006

Calendars and Natural Language

My friend Matt Hurst on his DataMining blog wrote about Spongecell, a new Ajax-based calendar that lets you enter events using natural language. Here are some examples Matt tried, with his comments:

• Visiting Granny at 12 on March 1st: no problem, off to a good start.
• Flying to Cambridge on the 2nd then back on the 4th: sweet - it got the two dates. They were placed in February, so no context (my last entry was March), but that is probably the right behaviour.
• Flying to Boston tomorrow: this got entered in today's field, could be a time zone problem. It is 2am on the 31st where I am, so the entry should have been on the 1st of February.
• Flying to Boston in a week: nope, turned up in yesterday's list. Could be related to the issue above in that it really meant to put it in today's list - either way it's wrong.
• Flying to Boston on Thursday: no problem.
• Flying to Boston a week on Thursday: nope - just Thursday. Flying to Boston on the 30th of Feb: oops - turns up on the 2nd of March. An understandable error, but certainly a corner case that needs to be addressed.

I tried out the site. My initial impression of the look and feel was good, including the appearance of the calendar itself and the bubble tips for new users. I found about 75% of my NL inputs were handled correctly on the system, but as Matt says it is likely that users will learn which cases work well and then get high performance using those patterns.

It's perhaps the best kept secret at Microsoft, but did you know that Microsoft Outlook already supports some natural language entry of calendar events as well? Open up an appointment (new or existing) and in the day slot for the time, enter "fourth monday of April". Outlook converts that into the correct date. I use this feature all the time.

TechCrunch has a writeup about SpongeCell and many other players in the Calendar2.0 space. That page features 73 comments, many by other calendar companies, so to some extent this captures the current state of play on this topic. One missing related company from the list is TimeBridge (product coming soon), a Mayfield portfolio company for which I'm advisor, along with my friend Mark Drummond (founder of one of the Calendar1.0 companies, called TimeDance, for those who remember).

After writing the first draft of this article, I saw another post on TechCrunch about Google's upcoming calendar. The information was leaked by a beta tester, and includes detailed screenshots. Key elements from that posting:

• Natural-language event input: Just type in your event details and the service will parse them to fill out the form automatically: "dinner with Michael 7pm tomorrow" (just like SpongeCell).
• Event pages: Create an event and automatically have a web page you can share with friends or the world at large.

• There is also discussion about Google Calendar scraping events from around the net, just like Zvents does.

  All of this was to be expected. It's not necessarily bad news for all the Calendar2.0 startups. I think they're not likely to succeed standalone and Google is unlikely to acquire them, but the enhanced feature set will likely become important for all the major portals, leading the top 3-5 of the new entrants to acquisitions in the near future.
  

Update: I got pointed to another cool calendar2.0: 30 Boxes. It also supports natural language entry, and it looks like it makes it really easy to share events with friends and family.

Posted by barney at March 10, 2006 3:36 PM

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Posted by: Antonio Valderrabanos at August 21, 2006 7:40 AM

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