The Digital Calendar of the Future

Tungle.me recently created an interestesting video discussing how today's digital calendar does not meet the needs of the business professional, much less the real estate professionals.  Looking ahead, there are a number of dynamic changes and technology innovations to look forward to, when it comes to managing your calendar.

Today’s calendar is broken. It’s a static repository of events. It’s a snapshot, a moment in time. Contrast that against our dynamic and ever changing lives and we have a significant disconnect. The model doesn’t work – it isn’t representative. It doesn’t leverage our digital footprints and create incremental value. The application is outdated and with that we have an opportunity to innovate.

If Tungle compares the leaders in the digital calendar space, they see very similar feature function developed to date. If they remove brand and unique UI elements, they are left with complete product parity.

The time to think about the calendar of the future is now. Tungle has assembled the opinions of some of the technology industry’s brightest minds to weigh in on what the calendar of the future might look like and the benefits it might provide to our personal and professional lives…This is a manifesto.

To view this video, continue reading...

The above video covers  the following topics:

History and Evolution:

The Egyptians were the first to work out a calendar formula for measurement of the solar year, based on the position of the Sun. This formula was eventually adopted by the Romans and was the forerunner to the modern calendar.

Other then the transition from analog to digital calendaring, we have seen little change in both the features and functions of the calendar, but also in the way we manipulate calendar data to help better serve our daily personal and professional lives.

This is not an exercise in developing a new set of features for our calendars. This is a tear down and rebuild. Let’s rethink the calendar. Let’s rethink the tools that help us manage our time.

Let’s start from the ground up and build an application that fits our evolving, dynamic, nomadic, connected lives.

The Ecosystem:

We live in a world of ubiquitous access. People today can get online from a number of devices – their laptop or desktop, their mobile devices and their tablets. We are a hyper connected society sharing information about ourselves, our locations and our plans. We publish to multiple platforms and we engage with multiple networks and communities. We play with social applications, location based services and we exist through multiple profiles.

The more technology enables us to do, the more we expect it to do for us. Now that we’re no longer tied to desktop devices, the floodgates have opened for geo-location and on-the-go social networking. The result is an environment ripe with opportunity.

Data and Semantic Relationships:

The digital revolution and today’s Internet have created disparate data silos:

Netflix know which movies I like. Yelp knows what food & restaurants I like. TripIt knows when, where and with whom I travel. Foursquare knows what brands and locations I like and am loyal to. Plancast knows where I am going to be and allows me to share my plans with my social graph.

You get the idea…

Because the calendar is the single greatest representation of the way we spend our time, with whom, where we go and our personal and professional interests; it is the logical repository for these data.

The calendar of the future must tear down the walls of the data silos, and connect them together to provide context to the user.

Transparency:

There is a cultural revolution underway which is resetting the way people interact, share and collaborate.

In many cases it is a generational divide – the older generation was raised on the foundation of privacy and secrecy – garden walls protecting their daily lives. Let’s remember that when Amazon launched in 1995 their was widespread fear that inputting your credit card number into the big scary machine would result in a violation of privacy, even identity theft.

By 2004, with the launch of Facebook – and the ecommerce explosion behind us – our comfort levels have increased and we are becoming acclimatized to open and sharing environments. Today people share their interests, their locations and their intentions.

Why? Because total transparency allows for total personalization.

Life, Optimized:

We never know how much time we have left in the bank of life.

We live in a world where everybody suffers from two common pain points; too much information, and not enough time. We can never make up for lost time. Everything we do is an investment of time.

Because we can’t make or get more time we need to optimize the way we choose to spend it. When we start investing too heavily in one area of our life and neglecting another we create an imbalance.

Harmony is about finding equilibrium. The future of calendaring is about measuring the way we want to spend our time against the way we actually do, and helping us align our professional lives against our personal goals.

Our calendars will help us live intentionally. It’s life…optimized.

The previous content and video can be found on Tungle Inc.'s new website www.calendarofthefuture.com.

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