Trumba calendars its service

As first reported in March, Trumba is an online calendaring application that lets people create, manage and share calendars over the Web (screenshot). Since mid-April, it has been available as a free beta, and bloggers like Alex Bosworth and David Ascher are test-driving it with overall positive results. In his post, RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady said that he too was pleased with the design and especially the ability for the service to handle time zones. On the downside, however, he said that it cannot import his particular iCal files despite it's purported compatibility with various formats, including iCal, CSV, txt, VCS, and Excel XLS formats.

Prostalgic, O'Grady expects to see increasing demand for more sophisticated calendaring applications like Trumba in the near term, and gives three good reasons why:

a.) There's been essentially zero innovation in them in recent years,
b.) We've all got complicated schedules and
c.) Most of would like some mobile integration (cell phone at a minimum)

With no advertising revenue (and therefore clutter), Trumba will have to rely on the annual subscriptions of $40 to $50 it plans to charge each user--a potential pitfall if the service is not ultimately compelling enough to persuade users from ditching free calendar services.  Bosworth point out that Trumba lacks a killer feature, but notes its efforts on calendaring as social activity.  Apart from building on this effort and delivering on ease-of-use, Trumba's ultimate road to success will be its ability to foster the kind of community spirit and stickiness of sites like Craigslist, which receives a staggering 2 billion ad-free page views per month despite a staff of 18 and disinterest in profit.

Trumba's full release to the public is expected this summer.