1. Please tell me about yourself:
   Well, I’m an entrepreneur that loves to work with smart people – and make a difference by solving a real pain.  I have lived through the ups and downs of the startup life and the Internet bubble.  I was part of the team that built the leading Canadian online bookstore – Chapters.ca.  I also worked several years as a VC, before seeing the light and getting back into a startup called Nimcat Networks, which we sold to Avaya in 2005.

   I have several degrees – all of them you can see on my LinkedIn profile.  I also sit on the board of a non-for-profit organization that my parents started when I was six years old – that’s dedicated to help the poor in India.

2. Please tell me about Tungle.me:
   Tungle.me  solves the pain of scheduling meetings for business professionals.  It makes scheduling meetings easy–across organizations, calendar systems and time zones–by eliminating the multiple emails, phone calls and double bookings that typically come with finding a time to meet.  We spent the last three years making sure Tungle.me worked in sync with all leading calendar applications including Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Entourage for Mac, and Lotus Notes.  Finally, it is important to note that when you use Tungle to easily schedule a meeting, the others do not need to be Tungle users, and they don’t need to sign-up or register.
3. Where did your inspiration for Tungle.me come from?
   It was while I was working at Nimcat Networks and other previous startups that I came up with the idea for Tungle. I found that as we began to grow, it became harder and harder to schedule meetings with other team members . Finding a time that worked for everyone was a real pain and we were too small a company at the time to afford a licensed copy of Microsoft Exchange, which would have allowed us to share our calendars. That gave me the idea for a creating a solution that would allow people to share calendars and availability without having to invest in an enterprise grade calendar solution…and the product evolved from there.
4. What is the best unused or unknown feature of Tungle.me?
   I think that our iPhone app is pretty cool.  You can shake your phone and Tungle will intelligently propose times that work for everyone.  I don’t see a lot of people shaking their iPhones yet…I think we need to make it more obvious for everyone to shake and meet.
5. It would seem that importing your calendar would possibly provide a lot of private information about some one personally or professionally.  What would you say to those that are concerned about privacy but want to test out the service?
   Tungle doesn’t share your calendar with anyone.  You, as a user, get to pick the times you want to make available for meetings, and that’s all that people see.  They never know if you are in a meeting or not, they never know what you are doing.  Complete control and anonymity.
6. Tungle.me is currently a free service.  How do you plan on monetizing?
   This is an interesting question because we are often told that we should charge for our service.  But we won’t, not now, and not ever – at least for the features that are available today.  We won’t charge because there isn’t one solution, except for Tungle that solves the scheduling pain across companies, platforms, time zones. Not one.  

   Tungle.me will be the defacto scheduling services for everyone – and we will achieve this by being very viral and keeping the barriers to using our service low – i.e. keeping it free.That said, we will be launching some premium features that will target our power users and specific segments later in 2010.  There are over 500 million professionals using electronic calendars – only a small percentage of them need to subscribe to our premium features once we launch them.

7. Can you pull back the curtain and let us know what’s on the horizon for Tungle.me?
   Yes, three words: mobile, social, search.

If you want to try Tungle.me for yourself, you can head over to their website and test it out for yourself.

Have you tried Tungle.me yet?  What were your thoughts about it?  Do you find it useful?

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