Calendaring: The last great niche?

...event. Transporting information from one calendar to a mobile phone or PDA, or even another PC, can also be difficult. Graphical interfaces can be restrictive on a phone, for instance.

Another frontier will be to add wiki functionality to services for organising group events, Yahoo executive Raymie Stata said during one panel discussion.

Improving work productivity and collaboration will also be paramount. Microsoft's Pavel Curtis, for example, founder of PlaceWare, a group-conferencing software company acquired by the giant about three years ago, discussed his work on new productivity tools. The products are intended to let a group of co-workers more easily coordinate edits on Word documents, presentations or project schedules.

The central theme of the When 2.0 conference is time, and how it relates to different services and applications. In one extrapolation of this, Mitch Kapor, president and chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation, talked about "stamping" tasks or events, or annotating them with meaning in time, with a beginning and end, a structure and notes. Without giving much more detail, he said this functionality will be part of an upcoming version of an open source personal identify manager code-named Chandler. Chandler integrates calendar, email, contact management, task management, notes and IM.

"This will be experimental at first... No one has figured out a great way to do this," Kapor said during an early panel called "Schedules and Calendars".

Microsoft's chief technical officer, Ray Ozzie, said he spends most of his day managing and juggling things. The home calendar, he said, is a "convenient place to communicate with my wife" and maintain a work schedule, which he prints out before the beginning of each day. "I jot notes down on that paper about meetings during the day," he said, having to write them down again later.

Microsoft, Bjordahl said in a later interview, has made a "significant investment" in its calendar program for the next release of Outlook, which is version 12 and is scheduled for late 2006. Since Outlook's first release in the late 1990s, its calendar component has largely been neglected in favour of improvements to email, he said. But the coming version, which is available in beta, will include a "cleaner, frictionless" user interface design and improved support for the industry de facto standard Internet Calendar Protocol, with bolstered sharing capabilities.

While major companies like Microsoft...