Doodle Blog

Our latest product called Doodle Unplugged was launched last week and has been covered as bringing about a “back to paper” trend! Take a look:

Funny Businesses For Ex-Lovers and Office Meetings

It’s called a piece of paper.

CNBC

Paper Making a Comeback at Doodle

Speaking of the digital trend, one outfit has come full circle.

Flack Me

Doodle takes its scheduling service offline … to paper.

the Rude baguette

These and other great responses have encouraged us to go to the next level. How about Doodle on the Rocks?

Today we’re announcing officially the launch of Doodle Unplugged, which is an offline version of our scheduling service. Doodle Unplugged runs on a piece of paper and was designed by our offline user interface experts. With Doodle Unplugged (available as convenient PDF-download), you’ll be able to schedule your events in less than one year, and that’s our guarantee.

Learn more!

Doodle Unplugged: "poll on paper"

With only a couple of hours to go in 2011, let’s briefly look back before we kick off 2012. Doodle has achieved a lot in 2011, here are a couple of highlights:

» Launched MeetMe, which adds an important new use case: Before, Doodle focussed on group events only, but MeetMe now also facilitates one-to-one meetings.

» Introduced a major redesign which offers a modern user experience, increased usability and cutting-edge technologies.

» Intensified our activities in France by partnering with StoriesOut. They also help us keep the French translation of Doodle up-to-date.

» Added Exchange and iCal to our ever-growing line-up of calendar integrations.

» Reengineered Mobile Doodle to benefit from specifics of modern smartphones. Furthermore, Mobile Doodle now also supports calendar integration, so our users can easily answer meeting requests on the go and within the context of their calendar information.

» Partnered with SevenOne Media to boost our marketing and sales activities in Germany.

» Cracked the important milestone of 10 million monthly users.

We’re thankful to everybody who supports Doodle — and in particular to our many users. Thank you for using Doodle and for helping us reach these milestones. All the best for 2012!

Today we’re announcing the launch of our iCal Connector (beta) that enables Mac users to synch their iCal calendars and use Doodle within OS X. We believe that everyone should be able to use Doodle no matter what calendar system they’re on, and with the launch of the iCal Connector, all of the major calendar platforms are now connected to Doodle, which means that scheduling collaboration can work across all boundaries.

The new iCal Connector is free and easy to install.

Overview of Doodle Calendar Connect

• Synch: Synchronize tentative and final Doodle appointments with your calendar and avoid double-booking
• View: View your existing calendar appointments during the scheduling process
• Share: Share your availability with selected contacts whether they use the same IT or calendar system as you or not
• Publish: Publish your availability in a personal MeetMe profile

Complete connectors are available for Google, Outlook, Exchange, and iCal (beta). All other electronic calendars can be connected via read-only ICS feeds. The Calendar Connectors are free and require a MyDoodle account (also free).

Get started with a few clicks!
Watch the Calendar Connect video!

If you use iCal on your Mac, please download the iCal Connector and let us know what you think!

In 2011 we conducted a variety of surveys about scheduling, appointment management, productivity, and calendars. The main results are included below (and more detailed in the Doodle Facts 2011). Are you already a schedling pro?

1. People spend almost four full days per year coordinating appointments
2. The more appointments people have, the less time they need when scheduling events
3. Gender has no influence on the time used when scheduling an appointment
4. It’s hard without a calendar
5. Half of Internet users stick with paper calendars
6. Most electronic calendar users aren’t completely satisfied
7. One out of five people already use an online scheduling service
8. Two-thirds of the Swiss use online scheduling
9. 30,000 new appointments on Doodle every day
10. Mobile scheduling tripled in 2011

The Doodle team continuously works hard to refine Doodle’s free and premium services. Today we are happy to announce premium license management, which is a major improvement that’s available to all premium users with more than one license (Premium Doodle Business). The administrator of a business account will now be able to manage the active licenses in an individual way via a new dashboard.

The new user management enables the subscription owner to:

• Whitelist premium users via email addresses or domains
• Automatically inform users about their Premium Doodle Business license
• View all active users of the subscription and see their usage
• Remove users and/or domains in order to free up licenses or prevent misuse

New Premium Doodle Business administration dashboard

All of the regular premium features are still a part of the package, including branding, ad-free usage for the poll initiator and all participants, efficiency options, SSL encryption, and a corporate Doodle URL. The competitive price plans remain the same and depend on the number of licenses per organization.

We also want to thank our loyal premium customers, such as Thomas Cook, GROUPE ADEO, The Ohio State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and many more associations, small companies, enterprises, educational organizations, and local and federal authorities.

We recently introduced a new format of online adverstising: the Calendar Ad. This new format will show up in the participation page of a Doodle poll as a small box and reveal additional information and the location upon mouse over. Marketers that way can promote all kinds of events, including fairs, parties, and launches. The Calendar Ad has a high relevance for the user as it appears when people are actually planning events around that specific time. For the beginning, only users in Germany and Switzerland will see it.

The ads on doodle.com contribute to a major share of Doodle’s revenue and enable us to provide the majority of all features for free. We heartily invite you to subscribe to a Premium Doodle price plan if you prefer to use the service without advertising and would like to profit from full branding capabilities and extra features.

More in our media update.

Calendar Ad in timely context: reveals additional information upon mouse over

The US leads the way with the fastest rate of growth

Online scheduling has reached a new milestone today as Doodle has now reached 10 million users per month* for September 2011. Users are distributed globally, and the main clusters are in Germany, Switzerland, France, the US and Belgium. The total number of users is more than three times larger than it was in 2009, and in the US, the amount of users (2M+) is almost four times larger than it was back then. Additionally, the usage of Doodle’s mobile version has had a threefold increase per year during the last two years.

Doodle's global user growth in the recent years

The viral growth of Doodle is fueled by the users who invite their contacts to meeting polls and therefore enable them to experience the benefits of Doodle. According to a recent survey**, 98% of all users discovered Doodle because of a personal invitation or recommendation.

Why did you start using Doodle?** (N=4,200)

The data also shows that users are extremely happy with Doodle when it comes to its design, reliability, data protection, functionality, and usability. Half of Doodle’s users use the tool more than once a month, more than half of them use it for professional scheduling, and 40% of them organize more meetings than they participate in.

Ratings by Doodle users** (N=4,200)

This large number of satisfied and regular users makes Doodle an attractive international advertising platform, and this accounts for the largest share of the company’s revenue. Doodle’s advertisers can reach their audiences in a precise way through thematic targeting, and the simple interface enables them to make a strong impact.

*Total unique visitors per month according to Google Analytics
**On-site international survey in September 2011 with 4,200 participants

Have you ever wanted to demonstrate the simplicity of Doodle to your friends who haven’t heard of us before? The great team at Whiteboard Animation Studio produced a video for you to share with anyone who needs to learn more about Doodle.

They also created a video about our favorite Doodle feature, which is the integration with different calendar systems that we call Calendar Connect. They developed an easy introduction to a professional feature.

As our group of developers has grown in the past few years, the development structure has become disorderly and the engineering team has been looking for some (but not too much) structure. In the past, Doodle released new features monthly, so the development process was kind of agile for years and this shouldn’t change. We liked it, and our customers (you …) liked it, too.

The most famous method of agile development is probably Scrum, and Scrum seemed to be a good fit for us. If you want more information about Scrum, check out Wikipedia or read the book “Scrum mit User Stories” (ISBN 978-3-446-42660-3), which we like and recommend. Unfortunately, this book is only available in German.

After a few weeks of preparation and research, we started our first cycle on September 28th and are running it for 3 weeks. The beginning was interesting, kind of exhausting, but fun, too. We also now have fancy task boards and burn down charts on our wall.

The engineers are looking forward to planning meetings, extreme programming, and retrospectives.

Do you have experience working with Scrum or do you have any questions? We love to hear from you, so please feel free to share your feedback.

Oliver Ganz