Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I’m working on a new concept for the SquawkBox on Friday, modeled on BarCamp.  The idea is pretty simple — we’ll hold a couple of BarCamp sessions (dubbed BarCamp Radio) in place of the regular SquawkBox.  Like BarCamp, the only real rule is that there are no rules.  Attendees need to lead a session, suggest a session, or participate.  That’s all.

The Wiki is up at the BarCamp.org site, and the call is already booked on the iotum Free Conference Call service on Facebook.

AND… Jonathan Jensen has kindly offered to run a session on converged billing.  Now I’m looking for one more leader.

See you Friday.

This morning we delved into thethe topic we couldn’t cover yesterday, which is the fascinating Economist special report on Mobile Nomadism.  The Economist talks about talks about the impact of always-on communications on business, education, relationships, architecture, and more.  We added observations on how nomadic work styles are changing business, peppered with a liberal selection of personal stories.

 

 Squawk Box April 16 [45:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Like most small business people, I make tons of meetings with people who aren’t part of my company. It’s a hassle. It’s a gigantic hassle, in fact. It often takes longer to schedule the meeting than the meeting itself takes. That’s the reason why I’ve been looking forward to the Tungle beta for some months now.

Tungle is a sidecar application for Outlook that lets you schedule meetings easily across organizations. It’s the simplicity of the invitation system that really differentiates Tungle. Say, for example, that you wanted to schedule a meeting with your PR agency, web site editor, and a graphic design artist. The best time for you to have that meeting is Thursday or Friday afternoon, and it needs to be 30 minutes long. Tell Tungle what you want, and it will mail invitations to all the participants. When they pick the blocks of time they could be available, Tungle will automatically find a time that everyone is available.

In conversation with CEO Marc Gingras a couple of weeks ago, he also revealed that there will be an API in the future that will allow other applications to integrate with Tungle.  Tungle’s vision is to become a scheduling utility.

When I first looked at Tungle nearly a year ago, it wasn’t ready for prime time. The beta that released today, however, is much much more mature. Although others have come to market with scheduling programs recently, I think Tungle is the one to beat. It’s simple to use, integrates well with Outlook and it’s a true timesaver. Head over to tungle.com, and sign up for the beta today!