We’re very glad that we were honored by the first place of the Swiss Opens Source Awards 2010 in the category Business. We’re also happy to get this first price together with Run my Accounts because as entrepreneurs we know exactly how important it is to have a reliable accounting.

More on the ceremony of the CH Open Source Awards (in German).

Thank you!

• Passed the 3 million users mark in April and continued to experience very healthy growth rates ever since then
• Named one of Switzerland’s best web sites, one of Switzerland’s most innovative companies, and a global innovator
• Conducted and published a much cited international study on scheduling behavior in corporations
• Launched the Doodle iPhone app
• Introduced paid services for organizations (Branded Doodle) and private individuals (Premium Doodle)
• And, most importantly, implemented a long list of improvements and extensions to make scheduling even easier, quicker, and more comfortable: close date/time polls, invite and inform participants from within Doodle directly (including an address book), XING integration, locations and maps, file attachments, calendar integrations (Outlook, Google Calendar, Lotus Notes, …), more translations, API, etc.

We would like to thank all our users and customers for their support and wish you all the best for 2010!

Selected from a pool of 1,200 worldwide applicants, these global innovators are the ones to watch as they disrupt their respective industries.

Together with Doodle, a total of 12 Swiss startups are nominated for the award. The winners will be announced in mid-January.

• All the nominees on the Red Herring web site

It’s easy, just use the badge below or click this link to access the pre-filled nomination form for Doodle as Best International Start-up. You can vote daily until Friday, Dec 4. Thank you!

And while you’re at it, please vote for our friends at Wuala, too. (They’re in a different category.)

We are happy to announce the winners of the Doodle API Contest today! Doodlendar, an application that integrates Doodle’s scheduling system with Google Calendar, developed by two students at the ETH Zurich, won first prize. Second and third prizes went to Manymoon (USA) and DoodleZack (Austria). Winners were chosen by a jury of web pros out of eight approved applications from six different countries.

“It’s great to see that working on an own project gets such appreciation,” said the winners Michael Schaufelberger (white shirt) and Stephan Merkli (blue shirt) yesterday at the “award ceremony”. Instead of the original prize, a trip to Zurich, they decided to take the cash prize: “Cash is easier to divide by the two of us… (Is it really? – see photo) … and we aren’t too worried about finding a way to spend it.”

Doodle CEO Michael Naef (black shirt) presents our API competition winners with first prize

With Doodlendar (introduction) one can use Doodle to schedule events in Google Calendar. Doodle’s meeting time options are added as tentative events in Google Calendar. As soon as a poll is closed and a definite time slot is chosen – this will be saved as the only appointment in the calendar. “Doodlendar is a useful and smooth marriage of Doodle and the widely-used calendar app. I love the side-by-side calendar to poll view,” jury member Gina Trapani (Founding Editor of Smarterware and Lifehacker) said about the winning application.

The runner-up, social productivity application Manymoon with ManyDoodle, commented: “We are excited to be using Doodle’s API to add the ability to schedule events within Manymoon. Our customers are already using our Doodle integration to schedule business events every day,” said co-founder Amit Kulkarni.

A big “Thank you!” to all participants and special thanks to the jury and our sponsors! 

• Sun Startup Essentials
• NOKIA
• Zurich Tourism
• Victorinox

We will not yet reveal the submissions. First, our jury will determine the contest winners. We expect to announce the winners in early May. Here are the members of our jury:

• Suhas Gopinath, Young Global Leader, Founder and CEO, Globals Inc.
• Alexander Hüsing, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, deutsche-startups.de
• Manuel Jaffrin, Patrick Liechti, Sun Microsystems
• Oliver Reichenstein, Founder and CEO, Information Architects
• Gina Trapani, Founding Editor, Smarterware, Lifehacker

Last year, I had the privilege of being one of Switzerland’s twenty Venture Leaders. Here’s what I had to say at the end of the program: “I was worried that we would waste time on chitchatting and sipping cocktails. As it turned out, «venture leaders» is an intense business-training program that will help me much better face various challenges that still lie ahead for our company.”

Last Thursday (in Lausanne) and Friday (in Zurich), I was asked to serve on the jury to pick the next 20 Venture Leaders. Looking at Switzerland’s start-up scene, it’s hard to believe that the economy is not doing too well right now. Thirty-eight company founders or project members (when a university project has not resulted in a spin-off yet) pitched their case by giving a 10-minute talk followed by 10 minutes of Q&A. Biotech and medtech always sound like rocket science to me. But I was also in awe of several software engineers.

My fellow jurors and I had a very hard time limiting the number of entrepreneurs to take part in this year’s Venture Leaders program to twenty when at least twenty-five contestants would have deserved it. Here they are: Venture Leaders 2009. Congratulations!