ProfileBuilder: Manage Your Profile, Not Accounts

nullWith a plethora of social networks for everyone from knitters to dog lovers, managing our increasing number of long tail profiles is a huge pain. The problem of managing a fragmented identity has been attacked two ways: creating a new master account (OpenID), aggregating identity through search (Spock, Wink), or aggregating management of all your accounts on one site. The latter solution has attracted quite a bit of attention with sites like Profilactic, ProfileLinker, and Loopster.

ProfileBuilder is another startup looking to help solve the identity problem by providing one place to manage your personal information. They gave party goers a sneak peek of their identity management tool at the TC 9 party at August Capital. During the beta preview, approximately 5,000 profiles have been created, and ProfileBuilder has received more than 450,000 page views. Now the site has launched to the public.

ProfileBuilder isn’t just about getting friend status updates or single login access, but more about easily controlling what information shows up on what sites. However, they do have an API that allows anyone to build a program to push updates from your profile to other social networking services. The service creates a master profile where you can catalog your biography, photos, links to other services, blogs, and even create new kinds of information pages. You can expose this information to people across the net through an embeddable badge (like View my Profile). When you place the badge on a site, ProfileBuilder knows and lets you choose what type of information gets exposed through the embed on that site. You can manage all your embeds through their website.

Encouraging people to use the service by embedding profiles across the web is no doubt a first step in toward serving as a total online identity solution. Plaxo has been gunning for this distinction as well, and certainly more companies will want to serve as the focal point for identity on the web.

TimeBridge: Now Synching Your Meetings Through The Web

TimeBridge is a San Francisco-based startup that wants to do one thing very well: help with scheduling meetings.

They originally started out as a deeply integrated Outlook plug-in launched at the end of last year. While initially distinguishing them from other scheduling competitors, I have a feeling that the plug-in requirement added unnecessary friction to using the system.

Now TimeBridge is back with a full web only interface that integrates with your Google and Outlook calendars, with support for other calendars soon. The new version pushes them in the direction of their Montreal-based competitor Tungle, which integrates with more calendars. Tungle also differs by using a P2P system that runs between you and your contacts systems, not on a central server like TimeBrigde.

TimeBridge’s original Outlook plug-in brought their full functionality to your desktop. All of this functionality is now available with the web application, using the plug-ins to pull and push calendaring data between your computer and the web. Updates made on one calendar are reflected on the others and a master calendar is accessible anywhere on the web.

To make a meeting, you log in to their site, and fill out an email-like form consisting of the email addresses for attendees, meeting topic, and possible meeting times. You don’t have to download anything to use TimeBridge, but it helps if you install the plug-ins. If your attendees don’t have a TimeBridge, you can just suggest times based on your personal schedule. If they have TimeBridge integrated with their calendars, though, you can view what blocks of their scheduled time in a sidebar as you choose times.

After you send out the meeting request, each participant gets a full meeting request form in their email. The form lists the possible meeting times, which participants can select as no good, good, or best. Accepting the meeting request places time placeholders on calendars for people with TimeBridge.

The system then picks the best meeting time by points based on attendee responses with ties going to earlier times. If a an upcoming meeting time hasn’t been settled, you can either pick a meeting time or send reminders to the people that didn’t respond. Attendees with TimeBridge will then see the confirmed meeting slot pop up on their calendars.

The video below outlines the process in greater detail. TimeBridge is a funded through a total of $8.5 million by Mayfield and Norwest Ventures.

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Posted in Company & Product Profiles |

How to Calculate Your Age by Chocolate

Yes, it's true: If you are old enough to do mathematics and you like chocolate, you might be able to figure out your age. By crunching these numbers (including the weekly frequency of your preference for chocolate), your age is mathematically revealed. It's a nifty trick for kids learning basic mathematics, who can practice it on adults and elicit reactions of surprise and amusement. Try it out to see for yourself, and then read on to find out how it works.

Steps

1. Determine how many times a week you eat or want chocolate. It must be a number between 1 and 10, including 1 or 10.
   • Let's say you eat chocolate 8 times a week (we won't tell).
2. Multiply that number by 2.
   • 8 x 2 = 16
3. Add 5 to the previous result.
   • 16 + 5 = 21
4. Multiply that by 50.
   • 21 x 50 = 1050
5. Add the current year (Gregorian).
   • 1050 + 2007 = 3057
6. Subtract 250 if you've had a birthday this year. If you haven't had a birthday this year, subtract 251.
   • Let's say your birthday hasn't passed yet.
   • 3057 - 251 = 2806
7. Subtract your birth year.
   • Assuming you were born in 1975...
   • 2806 - 1975 = 831
8. You'll end up with a 3 or 4 digit number. The last two digits are your age (if you're under 10 years old there will be a zero before your age). The remaining one or two digits will be the number of times per week you eat or want chocolate (the number you specified in the first step).

Why it works

• This really does work for anybody from 1 to 99 years old, although the chocolate part is just for fun (an added distraction). Here's how the mathematics work.
• Select a number between 1 and 10. Multiply by 2, add 5, multiply by 50. These steps are just a fancy way to push your (or your assistant's) random number out into the hundreds place. Here is what you'll get for all possible selections:

1	350
2	450
3	550
4	650
5	750
6	850
7	950
8	1050
9	1150
10	1250

• Add the current Gregorian year (2007):

1	2357
2	2457
3	2557
4	2657
5	2757
6	2857
7	2957
8	3057
9	3157
10	3257

• Subtract 250 (or 251 if your birthday hasn't happened yet this year). This yields the year of your last birthday (2006 or 2007) plus 100 times your chosen number:

1	2106
2	2206
3	2306
4	2406
5	2506
6	2606
7	2706
8	2806
9	2906
10	3006

• Subtract the year of your birth and get your age plus 100 times your chosen number. Put another way:

  (Year of your last birthday + (100 x your chosen number)) - Year of your birth = Your age + (100 x your chosen number)

Warnings

• This will not work consistently for people who are 100 years old or older.
• Your friends may think you are strange for playing this game as it requires inputting information from their date of birth into the equation.