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File Sharing - Sunday, November 20, 2005

Trumba - Profile

Trumba = Plaxo {just calendars} - contact management

HQ: Seattle, WA

Founded: 2004

Management: CEO is Jeremy Jaech. From 1990 to 2000 he was co-founder and CEO of Visio, a developer of business drawing and diagramming software. Microsoft bought Visio for $1.3B. Prior to that, he had co-founded Aldus, maker of PageMaker. It was acquired by Adobe in 1994. Jaech serves on the Board of RealNetworks.

Investors: In November 2005, the company raised $8M in Series B led by Oak Investment Partners with returning investors August Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Board memebers from Kleiner and August were previously on the board with Visio.

Business Model: Trumba sells subscriptions to its Web-based, social-networking calendar that it licenses for $39.95 per year to organizations and families. It lets people share calendars across different Web sites or devices — and it automatically pulls in dates from Web sites. Trumba supports unlimited sub-calendars and makes it easy to publish and subscribe to calendars via email and RSS.

Competitors: Airena, CalendarHub, Planzo.com,Zimbra, RSSCalendar.com, Yahoo Calendar, Apple iCalendar

Dirt: Six months ago, a non-tech buddy let us know that he was tired of trying to organize meetings via Microsoft Outlook Calendar and wanted to know what else was available - he even thought of launching his own startup. We investigated and could not find much available as viable alternative to Outlook Calendar. We are now amazed to see so many VC-backed companies are competing in social networked calendaring. The Trumba team has done some amazing things in their careers and by most accounts Trumba is solid, however, it cannot continue to charge for its calender now that if faces probably unexpected competition. With Microsoft Live in place, we can imagine the Trumba guys selling-out to Redmond once again. Yahoo! has a solid calendar application and we can foresee that Google, Microsoft and others will want their Trumba too.