

Show HN: Boomerang Calendar - a smart calendar assistant in your Gmail - moah
http://boomerangcalendar.com/beta.html

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iag
Why hasn't Google acquired this company yet? They've been doing such great
work and they obviously have the right passion to make email/calendar better
for the world.

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jayzee
Because they has been busy updating gmail design.

To me it looks like Google has stopped caring about what their customers want
and is focusing instead on things that they think we want...

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moah
Use showhn as beta code if you want to download. ======= Hey HN, We just
launched Boomerang Calendar (private beta) and would love to get your
thoughts. It helps you see your availability from your inbox and streamlines
scheduling meetings.

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wordplay
Fascinated by the nascent eco-system of apps built on top of email. To PG's
point in one of his essays about fixing email...I wonder if the transition to
the future of email lies in using email as a protocol.

As applications are developed that better utilize some of the structured data
within email, do we eventually transition to a world where very few emails
under a certain threshold are read...but instead parsed for information
content. Thus potentially putting the receiver back in control of the overall
experience?

~~~
baydinalex
I think you're right about email as a protocol.

There are a couple reasons I think we'll continue to read most of our
messages, though: * If the automatic parser misfires on one out of 50 messages
(a really hard threshold to hit, as we've learned from building BCal), you
still have to review the messages it determined you "shouldn't read" - so it's
really not adding a ton of value. Just saving you the step of clicking the
delete button * Deleting junk email doesn't take very long - 80% of deletions
happen in under 3 seconds.

That said, there's a ton of gray area for products like Boomerang Calendar,
which facilitate the interaction you'd want to take, but don't choose it for
you. We're working on some of those :)

Thanks for getting my brain's gears turning!

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adennis4
I started using Boomerang last summer as I had so many emails that were
getting lost in the mix. It was like having a personal assistant always
reminding me to follow up.

Excited that you have moved on to a calendar assistant as well. It's
definitely where I struggle the most. Looking forward to using the product.

Thanks.

~~~
skrish
Absolutely. The cool features like remind me if there is no reply in the next
2 days has been one of the many features I use everyday. I have recommended
this to so many folks now.

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ses
This seems like a good idea, with decent gmail integration. It's certainly one
of the best approaches to the meeting 'time slot suggestion' problem I've seen
so far. I developed a product (meetingShed <http://www.meetingshed.com>) which
aims to solve the meeting scheduling problem from another angle - using
people's Google calendar data by a sharing mechanism so you don't have to send
messages back and forth between people. There's advantages and disadvantages
of both approaches, but this is definately an interesting implementation.

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amirmc
Aside: Why have separate domain names for all your products? I didn't even
realise you had more than just Boomerang Calendar until I read the other posts
in this thread.

Even going to the about page, didn't have an obvious link to the list of
products (<http://www.baydin.com/>). Just a link that says "see our other
products" would be great.

~~~
moah
Thanks, amirmc. This is great feedback. We will probably point About Us to
Baydin.com home page directly.

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kalvin_ridejoy
Doesn't work for me on latest mainstream Chrome on 10.7-- when I download, the
button says "Keep" instead of "Continue" (i.e. it's treating it as a file
instead of an extension). Then when it's downloaded the CRX, attempting to
load it causes Chrome to try and re-download the same CRX file, bringing up a
save dialog...

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baydinalex
uh oh, that's not what's supposed to happen. Can you install other extensions?
If so, please email us at support@baydin.com and we'll see if we can help out.

~~~
ncavig
Same thing happened to me. Downloaded it instead, and tried to install and it
still didn't work. OSX Lion, chrome v 19.0.1084.30

~~~
baydinalex
Can you send us an email as well? We tested on Lion before release this
morning, and everything seemed OK on our end

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tomtom101
WOW! Just downloaded, watched the video and tried it out. Simply brilliant.
Only one extra feature request/tweak - instead of defaulting for a meeting
location when using the "suggest times to meet button" could it also have an
option for my conference call number as a lot of my meetings are by phone.

~~~
baydinalex
awesome, thanks!

we'd like to have the locations dialog remember your previous entries (and
making your phone number one of those options is a great idea) in a future
update.

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cnu
Great product. But do check for broken links on the website.

The download page <http://boomerangcalendar.com/beta/download.php> link to
/beta/features.html and /beta/faq.html.

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zachh
Boomerang for Gmail is already amazing, and this seems like an even more
incredible addition to streamline email + calendar scheduling.

Awesome job guys! Keep up the good work.

~~~
baydinalex
Should have put the code in the post title. Sorry about that! Use the invite
code 'showhn' (no quotes) to skip the line :)

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waldr
This looks really interesting, we started developing a tool identical to this
recently - had a play with it and it works well. Well done guys! it's
certainly got us thinking

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vineet
Glad to see that you have a great set of people endorsing you guys. I can't
imagine people better than Andrew Carengie, Amelia Earhart, and Noah.

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moah
Anyone wants to give us a testimonial? Send me a note moah@baydin.com :)
You'll be in good company with Andrew Carnegie!

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nathanfp
I use Boomerang for Gmail all the time, excited to see how the app can make my
calendar scheduling simpler as well.

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cloudwalking
Better Calendar integration with Gmail than Google can pull off? Interesting.
Will definitely give this a try.

~~~
baydinalex
cool, let us know how it works for you!

~~~
wattjustin
I use Boomerang every day with Gmail and I think I would lose a lot of hair
without it. Very excited to try this out.

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jonathanmarcus
This is pretty incredible. Really clever. Any plans for iCal integration?

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omnisaurus
I was using boomerang BEFORE it was on Hacker News.

