About Tungle

In April of 2011, the Tungle team joined Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of BlackBerry.

But the Tungle story actually begins back in 1999 when Tungle founder, Marc Gingras, cofounded Gytek and noticed a common problem among start-ups and small businesses.

The companies were fine when they were just a few people. Discussing a project was as simple as picking up the phone or even talking across the room.

It was when the companies started to grow that the problem arose. Finding a time to meet became a major headache and often took more time than the actual meeting itself.

They would become big enough to need an Exchange server, but not big enough to afford the luxury.

What’s more, the majority of meetings involved at least one person from outside the company. An Exchange server wouldn’t solve the cross-company, cross-platform, cross time zone dance.

It was a problem. But with every problem comes an opportunity to innovate. And that’s what Tungle set out to do.

The first thing to look at was calendars. After all, that’s where our meetings live. Calendars, as they were, did nothing to solve the problem. But this was Google, Microsoft, IBM and Apple – big companies already fighting over e-calendar turf. A time start-up couldn’t compete.

That settled it. Building a whole new calendar wasn’t the solution… at least not yet.

What about a tool to work on top of the big guys? Something that allowed companies of any size, on any platform, to do business with anyone else, no matter where they were or what system they were on – without even having to think about those things.

With that, Tungle was born.

Today, the Tungle application supports Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple iCal, Entourage for Mac, Lotus Notes, BlackBerry, Windows Live, Yahoo!, and connects to major social networks including Facebook, Plancast, TripIt, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Members of the service include 40% of Fortune 1000 companies, people from over 150 countries, and professors, administrators and students from over 800 universities worldwide.

Before joining RIM, the team had grown to 23 people and was headquartered in Montreal, Quebec with a Research and Development office in Waterloo, Ontario.

As part of the RIM team, Tungle continues to work toward making calendaring as simple, flexible and intuitive as possible, allowing you to easily do business when and where you need to.