Today, we are excited to introduce Magneto Calendar. Magneto is a new calendar system that fixes your calendar and helps you build a better day.
Magneto is launching in Beta. It includes five key calendar fixes:
- automatic dynamic travel times
- scheduling with people outside your company
- integrated smart to-dos
- a browser extension
- automatically blocks your work calendar with personal appointments
Magneto syncs in the cloud with recent versions of Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar. It also offers a web app and a native iPhone app.
Why now?
Calendars haven’t evolved in almost 20 years. In 1996, Microsoft launched Exchange, which allowed coworkers to see each others’ schedules. In 2006, “Crackberry” was named word of the year by Webster’s Dictionary and Google put the calendar in the cloud. Most people still use a calendar that is based on a data model from the late 90s – when Seinfeld was still on TV and the most popular web browser was Netscape Navigator.
Calendars haven’t kept pace with our lives. They haven’t even kept pace with new software available to professionals over the past few years — tools like Evernote, Dropbox, the iPhone, Yammer, and more. We’ve seen a renaissance in the quality of tools available to busy people, but there’s a calendar-sized hole in the picture. We’ve built Magneto to fill that hole and give busy people a better choice.
Calendars are broken.
We started Magneto by interviewing dozens of people. As they showed us their calendars, we saw five key patterns of hacks emerge — five ways that calendars are broken.
1) Being on time is important and hard.
Our calendars know where we need to be and when we need to be there – but the time it takes to get between appointments is a black hole. Some people hack this by manually blocking out time in their schedule; others simply wing it and are often late as a result.
2) We have to schedule meetings with people who work at different companies.
On average, it takes 9 back-and-forth emails for two moderately busy people to schedule a meeting. We’ve come to expect the ability to share our files and documents with anyone, but it’s simply not possible to easily share your availability with professional or personal contacts who use a different calendar system.
3) Calendar events come from everywhere and anywhere.
It may be a Facebook event, an OpenTable reservation, a Paperless Post invite, or just an email. And by far the most common way for people to get events into their calendars is to copy and paste. Copy a field, paste the field. Over and over. It’s tedious and error-prone.
4) To-dos are isolated from our schedules.
We saw a lot of people blocking time in their schedules to work on projects. We saw them add reminders to pay rent, run errands, or send a document before a deadline. Lots of people make time for their to-dos in their calendar — but the thousands of to-do apps just require you to check your to-do list. They don’t help you find time to do your to-dos.
5) Work and personal have to be manually managed.
Busy professionals tend to have multiple calendars: one for work, one for personal. (Or more!) The only way to make sure your colleagues don’t try to book you for a meeting during your doctor’s appointment is to manually make copies of each personal appointment.
Of course, some people choose to enter all their personal appointments into their work calendar — ensuring that the good folks in IT will know about their trips to the psychiatrist, gym, and everything else.
Magneto’s Fixes
Magneto can do things that other calendars simply can’t do. We’ve rebuilt the calendar from the ground up with an entirely new data model so people can stop hacking their calendar to fit their life. With the launch of Magneto we are introducing five key calendar fixes:
- Automatic driving times added to your schedule so you can always be on time, even if traffic changes.
- Simple scheduling outside your company. Share a snapshot of your calendar and find a time to meet with one or more people.
- Create instantly from any webpage with a browser extension that grabs meeting information for you.
- Smart to-dos integrated with your calendar so you can find time to do your to-dos.
- Block out personal time in your work calendar so your colleagues (who are still using Exchange or Google) know when you’re unavailable, but not what you’re doing.
Plus, we’ve packed the beta version with lots of easter eggs and other small features that we hope will help you get through your day faster and more efficiently.
About the Magneto Calendar Beta Program
Starting today, we are opening Magneto Calendar to a much broader audience with our Public Beta program. Anyone can request a beta invite, and we’ll start sending out those invites today.
We would love to simply throw open our doors and let everyone in without the invite process, but it wouldn’t be responsible of us. We want to make sure that every single person who uses Magneto can get their questions answered quickly. And since calendars are mission-critical, we want to make sure we can adjust our servers and increase our computing power to meet demand. We’ll invite more people every day, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback as you use Magneto in the coming weeks and months.
You can love Magneto for one fix like the smart to-dos or the browser button, or you can use them all. We will be satisfied if we saved 10 minutes in your day, happy if we helped you get to a meeting on time, and call it a day if you got one more to-do checked off.
Enjoy! We can’t wait to hear what you think of Magneto. Drop us a line at help@magneto.me.
Gadi, David, Ellen, and the Magneto team