David Hicks lives and blogs in Ottawa where he is the Marketing & Social Media Manager for AffinityClick, a startup that connects bloggers with advertisers through contextually relevant product placements.  You can reach David at david@affinityclick.com, follow him on Twitter at @affinityclick, or keep tabs on his blogging exploits at blog.affinityclick.com.

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I work for a startup, AffinityClick, that provides product placements for bloggers.  But I’m not really here to talk about what AffinityClick does (we have a website for that), I’m here to talk about what I do at AffinityClick on a daily basis.  In short: everything, because at a startup there is no Department of Whatever to do the task.  So while there are many things I wish I had to help me do my job more efficiently, the one thing I really need is more time.

Throughout my days I have reason to talk to people who can help me do my job.  Let’s call these ‘meetings’.  I submit for you a typical exchange between ‘Jim’ and I trying to arrange a time to conduct a meeting:

- … great, Jim, let’s talk on Friday about this.

- Sorry, Dave, Friday’s bad.  How about Thursday afternoon or Monday morning?

- Can’t do Thursday, have a meeting.  Monday at 10?

- Oops, my calendar filled up, Monday is no good anymore.  Wednesday?

Add a week of dickering and negotiating by email, voicemail, and carrier pigeon later and Jim and I are still trying to pin down a suitable time.  Add two or three more people to the mix and the situation becomes a huge drag on forward momentum and a giant waste of time.

To add complexity to the problem, the calendaring landscape is a fractured, burned-out wasteland of warring empires.  Outlook, iCal, and Google Calendar all exist as feudal city-states, each surrounded by a moat of incompatible data formats.  There are ways to get them to play nice, but for the most part, your calendar remains locked up in a tower like a damsel in distress.  More importantly, I don’t care what calendaring software Jim uses (I barely care what calendaring software I use), I just want to talk about the Next Big/Shiny Thing with him.  And soon.

While I was in Blogworld a short while ago I met the team at Tungle.  (I even crashed their party with Scott Stratten of Unmarketing fame).  They seem like nice people, they were wearing matching purple t-shirts, and they’re from Montreal.  They understand poutine (warning, clicking the previous link will either make you very hungry or vaguely horrified) and purport to have a solution to my meeting scheduling woes through their web service Tungle.me.

Like many things that happen at tradeshows, I promptly forgot about it until I had another one of those meeting-tag moments.  So I checked it out.  After all, what the hell is a tungle?

Signup was quick and painless.  They seem to support every method of authentication known to social media (even Yahoo! I LOL’d).  I was able to set up and sync my Google calendar in a few key strokes, and voila, I now have my own Tungle webpage where I can share my availability and book appointments with other Tunglers (Tunglists? Tungleurs?) or even people who haven’t joined the service, provided they are using a modern calendar platform.  There’s even the requisite free iPhone and BlackBerry apps to make things even easier for people on mobile devices.

The good news is it works.  And it works well.  No more back-and-forth, no more negotiating, no more spending three days trying to arrange a 30 minute phone call or a week trying to co-ordinate a teleconference with five attendees spread out across three continents.

So despite what Tungle promises about making scheduling painless (it does) and easy (creating meetings is almost fun.  Almost), what they really do is make it quick.  And for me that is invaluable because time is the one thing I can’t make more of in a busy day.

Our friend Rocky Walls over at 12StarsMedia created this awesome video about his love of Tungle. Be sure to check out it his full post here. He looks pretty good in purple, no?