ikordo cancels all meetings [Falco]
March 31 Mike Butcher
ikordo, a UK web application for arranging meetings between busy professionals, is to cease trading (i.e. Falco*), along with parent company Volutio.
The information I have is that despite much interest from potential investors - one of which I understand to be Eden Ventures - Volutio was unable to secure a further round of investment.
Prior to ikordo’s launch last year Volutio did some research and found that 25% of executives spend up to three hours doing the mechanics of organizing a meeting with people outside of their organisation; a further 6% spend a whole day doing so. So that’s a space for a startup to address, right?
However, my sources tell me that the firm found out what probably a lot of people could have told them - although lots of people have difficulty arranging meetings, especially between three or more people, most web apps tend to be beaten by people just picking up the phone. Getting adoption for a new service outside the enterprise is probably pretty damn hard.
As someone who was recently on the end of an ikordo invite, I have to say the interface to it was pretty damn confusing and it seemed to take days to organise a simple lunch. Or perhaps it was just me?
CEO James Cook is now looking for new opportunities, but with two years experience building a startup under his belt I daresay he’ll be snapped up.
Update: I forgot that there is a free web app for arranging meetings called doodle. It’s quite good.
* If you don’t understand “Falco” look here (btw, where is Dave Green when you need him?).
Comments
March 31st, 2008 at 3:05 pm
If ever there was a need; maybe it’s too hard a problem to solve?
March 31st, 2008 at 3:06 pm
In the meantime, there’s http://doodle.ch/ I suppose.
For those of you under 30, more Falco-ey goodness is here: Rock Me Amadeus
(Er war ein Superstar, er war Popular)
March 31st, 2008 at 3:09 pm
More Falco here.
March 31st, 2008 at 3:38 pm
No one investing in companies anymore because of the credit crunch?
March 31st, 2008 at 8:49 pm
That’s a shame. I met James at FOWA last year and thought it was a cool idea. But I never got round to trying it out, even though I’ve used doodle loads, so I don’t think the need for it was quite there. Personally I think I’d rather go down the outsourced PA route, if I was important enough
April 1st, 2008 at 9:05 am
Strangely I was looking for the ikordo site the other day so I could recommend it to someone who was having a nightmare organising a meeting. I could not remember the name of the site so punched in various search terms into Google - the site did not come up either under sponsored links (not surprising if they were running out of cash) or free links - so I was not able to find it. Shame - it was a really nice idea. Maybe not appropriate for everyone/every meeting, but it would be a neat addition to MS Outlook, if the technology could be integrated.
April 1st, 2008 at 10:34 am
http://www.meetwithapproval.com is another option.
Definitely a shame that ikordo has gone, and a depressing one for the UK start-up scene. It seemed to reflect a geniune need (although definitely needed distribution through enterprise channels to get traction), as anybody who regularly needs to herd cats to get a load of people in a meeting room (particularly when you’re from different companies, and the different companies use different calendaring tools so that there’s no compatability around invites received, i.e. Outlook/Lotus Notes) will attest.
Agreed with Danvers that the key to this one (for ikordo, and for plenty of other social services) is integration with email. ikordo did have a beta Outlook plug-in (this page is still live on their site at time of writing http://www.ikordo.com/about_outlook.cfm - check out the Google cache if this has gone, search for ikordo outlook), and looks like there was a gmail plug-in in the pipeline.
So they were doing the inbox integration. I definitely think we’ll be seeing more integration of 3rd party social (and productivity) services in the email client/service, so that you can leverage your persistent social network (i.e. your email address book) and have very convenient access to these 3rd party services (via a plug-in) in a place that really makes sense and that gets used a lot (i.e. you don’t need to remember to go off somewhere else to use the service).
Xobni’s obviously doing good stuff in relation to making Outlook a more intelligent experience via their plug-in (making sense of your emailing activity; Bill Gates talked about this being the future of social networking), and people like rememberthemilk have created a great gmail integration for their to-do list service. So I definitely expect to see more services doing such integrations (whether they’re trying to improve the email experience or to leverage the address book so that users don’t have to create a version of their social network again on a new service), and also with IM where the target user community is more IM-centric. Interesting area as a whole (particularly when also thinking about the whole data portability angle, and as the social networks, whether LinkedIn or Facebook et al, develop their messaging/collaboration propositions - ikordo could have been a nice service on the new LinkedIn platform, thinking about it).
Anyway, shame to see ikordo go, and a bit baffling considering that they weren’t a speculative 2-man start-up, had a vc behind them already, had been at Demo only recently (so weren’t just operating in the UK), seemed to be solving a real-world problem and were doing it in an integrated way (i.e. in the context of the inbox). Don’t know how well the service worked, or if distribution was problematic (e.g. was there enterprise traction, were Microsoft/others playing ball?). Seems strange that nobody stumped up more cash (or even a tactical purchase by one of the email providers, whether Microsoft or other).
PS I’m looking into email integration of services, hence my apparent obsessive interest in this!
April 2nd, 2008 at 3:23 am
For those who are looking for a replacement to Ikordo-check out http://www.scheduleonce.com
Its a simple and powerful tool!
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:07 am
Check out http://www.timebridge.com, an easy alternative that despite some early glitches seems to me to be the best option these days.
April 4th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Good to see so many positive comments re ikordo - I agree it’s a shame we aren’t trading any more!
we think we were, in the end, beaten by the psychology of how people wish to solve this problem.
IMHO a solution will be found that will include natural language, but there’s still work to do.
Meantime, good luck to our competition and thanks to everyone who supported us over our two years.
regards
Jim Cook
April 4th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Jim - Let me know your next move, and good luck!
April 12th, 2008 at 12:08 am
I didn’t get a chance to even spot Ikordo before it went offline! A shame.
The simplest offering of the bunch by far is http://whichweekend.com - although it’s only useful for organising which weekend people are free!
I’m a believer in starting with the bare minimum required to implement a useful idea. Some of the startups on the scene seem to try to do too much before their launch - probably to justify the investment - whereas a quick dirty launch with incremental updates would probably result in a better end result.
Good luck on the next venture Jim.