Baydin Releases Boomerang Calendar - Revolutionary Email-Based Calendar Assistant

SAN FRANCISCO, April 26, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Baydin, an innovative startup company that produces productivity enhancements for email platforms, announced today the release of Boomerang Calendar, the world's first smart email-based calendar assistant.

Boomerang Calendar combines artificial intelligence, optimized templates and visual interface paradigms to make scheduling meetings and appointments easier than ever before. The service makes planning meetings faster and more intuitive, thus reducing email overload while increasing calendar data accuracy with fewer missed meetings.

Boomerang Calendar adds a powerful set of scheduling features directly into the email client. When the service's natural language system detects a date or time in an email, it highlights the text of the event with free/busy status at that time, without requiring users to open their calendars. Boomerang Calendar allows users to add detected events to their calendars with one click, extracting location information and meeting times from the email text automatically.

"For many of us, scheduling meetings and appointments is the biggest contributor to email overload," said Alex Moore, CEO of Baydin. "Boomerang Calendar makes the process much simpler and much more natural, without requiring you to leave your email. We hope that the service will help people build stronger relationships by making meeting planning much more efficient."

The service also pioneers a new approach to proposing meeting times. When composing an email, Boomerang Calendar allows users to select free time slots from a visual interface while populating an email template with the correct dates and times thus preventing typographical errors. Likewise, Boomerang Calendar includes rich support for the meeting location that detects and injects address information so that everyone arrives at the correct place.

With Boomerang Calendar, group scheduling receives much-needed improvements. Meeting organizers can select a list of possible times then email them to a group of participants. As each participant selects times which they can attend, the email itself changes to reflect real-time availability. The product includes a web interface for managing these events and for the first time, participants can see availability and respond from directly within the email, helping to dramatically increase response rates.

Finally, Boomerang Calendar provides automatic email reminders, so that everyone attending the event receives an email to make sure it's top of mind the morning before the meeting. By allowing users to bring event-related emails to the top of their inboxes immediately before the meeting, all of the meeting details are accessible on the go.

In the company's closed beta testing, users saw a 25% decrease in missed meetings thanks to Boomerang Calendar's automatic reminder emails and reduced transcription errors from using the service. "There's nothing more frustrating than setting up a meeting, only to have it fall through when someone enters the wrong time into their calendar or double-books themselves," Moore said. "We're very happy to see a dramatic difference in the number of missed meetings when people use the service."

The first release of Boomerang Calendar integrates with Google's Gmail and Google Calendar platforms. It provides support for multiple calendars and shared calendars. A version for Microsoft Outlook is currently under development.

Boomerang Calendar is the second product in Baydin's suite of email plugins. It joins Boomerang (available for Gmail and Outlook), a plugin that enables email scheduling, response tracking, and integrated reminders. Boomerang for Gmail has been downloaded over a million times.

To download Boomerang Calendar, visit http://boomerangcalendar.com/.

About Baydin:
Baydin is a startup email technology company that produces the innovative Boomerang service for both the Gmail and Outlook platform. It also offers The Email Game, a Gmail-focused email productivity tool, and Boomerang Calendar, an email-based calendar assistant. Founded by MIT and Dartmouth engineering graduates, Baydin secured seed funding from 500 Startups, K9 Ventures, and other investors, and is now profitable due to premium subscription sales. The name of the company comes from the Burmese language, and means "foretelling the future through magic." For more information, visit www.baydin.com.

SOURCE Baydin