Online calendars scheduled for launch
That's certainly the hope of a crop of new companies, who hope to get you using the Net not just for checking e-mail and stock quotes, but for keeping track of appointments, to-do lists and business contacts.
This week two companies, When.com and Schedule Online, officially launched Web-based schedulers, and another, Jump Network, is set to launch Monday at Internet Showcase in San Diego.
These products, and others launched earlier, combine the ease-of-use of an electronic organizer with the Web's ability to connect to people and sources of information.
"You get universal access from anywhere connected to the Web, and it's also about getting your address book, task manager, and the rest to work together," said Bill Trenchard, Jump's CEO. "Like a portal site, it gets updated with weather and information, and if two people have an account on the site they can share data back and forth."
A portal is a multi-featured site that acts as a user's gateway to the Internet, one of the most popular examples being Yahoo!
Newly launched When.com has similar features, plus e-commerce links, so people can sign up to be notified when their favorite band comes out with a new music CD, then click on a link to Music Boulevard to buy it.
Netscape Communications Corp. (Nasdaq:NSCP)said Tuesday it will use When.com's online calendar for its Netcenter portal page, and will integrate the scheduler into other Netcenter offerings. A Netscape official said the calendar should appear on Netcenter in about a month.
Calendars for groups
ScheduleOnline, from San Diego-based Jintek, seeks to distinguish itself by offering a scheduling calendar for groups, such as people who work together or members of clubs and volunteer organizations. People can use the application to keep their own agendas, and when it's time to plan a group meeting the software will check for scheduling conflicts, explained Hans Hartman, Jintek marketing vice president.
"It's like Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange, but the difference is those systems are complex to manage -- you need a system administrator and local- or wide-area-network to get it to work, whereas everything we do is on the Net," Hartman said.
ScheduleOnline launched Thursday.
Other online calendars include PlanetAll, which Amazon.com acquired in August, Appoint.net, Dataferret, and Remind-U-Mail.
Whether users will end up using the Web for most of their office activities -- consulting news and reference materials, taking notes, organizing their time -- remains to be seen. But some experts say one stumbling block might be "bit rot," or the transitory nature of digital data.
Paper is still powerful
"People are starting to realize that bits are these ephemeral things and that they do degrade," said Paul Saffo, a technology researcher with the Institute for the Future.
He said even though he's been "utterly dependent on computers since I was an undergrad," and uses a voice-activated digital assistant to place or take all his calls, he takes notes and keeps his appointments in notebooks with acid-free paper.
"Just recently, I looked up my notes for a meeting with John Sculley in 1985," Saffo said, pointing out that electronic media from that year would doubtless be unreadable today.
Reuters contributed to this report.