The Family Calendar Blog

Mediabee announces a new release of Family Dashboard, which makes it a lot easier for families and small groups to coordinate their activities. It sports a cool new look and offers better integration with your iPod, Yahoo, iCal, Microsoft Outlook, and RSS news. Now you can put your children’s daily schedules right on their iPods.

Westborough, MA (PRWEB) March 8, 2006 — Mediabee announced today V2, the next generation of Family Dashboard, their groundbreaking all-in-one organizer software that helps families and small groups coordinate all their scheduling and communication.

In recent times, a number of so-called Web 2.0 companies have cropped up with web-based calendar sharing solutions. Mediabee’s solution stands apart from the pack for its focus on the needs of busy moms and small business owners as “managers” of small teams. Mediabee’s solution provides the appropriate level of ease-of-use, sharing, and robustness for this target audience.

Mediabee was founded by Saro Saravanan, the former chief architect of Fidelity Investments’ retirement planning website. Saro and his team identified a number of real-life scenarios, such as the use of the wall calendar and day planner, homework notices and school work, and the situations relating to elder care and joint custody of children. They also worked with a large number of beta users in coming up with V2. The result is a clearly distinguished solution that can easily address these real-life needs.

As a downloadable application, it is an ideal “anchor” application for the kitchen computer in a broadband household. But you can still easily get to it from wherever you are using a browser or a phone.

With the newly released “copy to iPod” feature, each member of the family can download their contacts and calendars to their iPods. Also available is the ability to export Mediabee calendars and contacts to Yahoo, iCal, and VCF formats.

Another key feature of Mediabee is how easily community members can share specific schedules with each other. For example, let’s say you’re entering your daughter’s homework schedule into Mediabee. With just a couple of extra clicks, you can share that with everyone in your zipcode (or internationally, if that’s appropriate).

Mediabee is a free download, released under the “donationware” license. If you’re unable to see the picture included in this release, please use the following link: http://mediabee.com/pad/animated.gif.

About Mediabee
Mediabee was founded in 2002 by Saro Saravanan, the chief architect who launched Fidelity NetBenefits while he was at Fidelity Investments. A software industry veteran and serial entrepreneur, Saro’s unique focus on user experience helped him produce award-winning world-class products used by over 10 million users today.

A late 2003 study conducted by Cogent Research for Mediabee shows that 87% of households with PCs and PDAs still use wall calendars and day planners for coordinating their daily activities.

Mediabee’s mission is to bring to life the 21st century Wall Planner — an alternative solution that consumers would love to adopt — on PCs, cell phones, Internet TVs, plasma displays, security panels, set-top boxes, media centers, home gateways — whatever devices customers choose. To that end, we have created a platform-independent system with a flexible architecture. Mediabee’s passion to bring this product to market is driven by research, real-life user feedback, and rapid innovation.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Saro Saravanan
508-341-2042
707-222-0363 (fax)
http://mediabee.com

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http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/3/prweb354906.htm

We’re happy to announce the release today of Mediabee V1.26. We’ve made the initial user experience, especially for new users, a little simpler, fixed a number of bugs, implemented a few user-requested features, especially in the address book, and finally implemented the syntax for monthly entries.

To make a monthly entry in V1.26 and above, do it as follows:

Car Payment, monthly;1, Jack

That reminds Jack that his monthly car payment is on the 1st of each month.

We always recommend upgrading to the latest version so you can be assured that known bugs will not affect your experience. Get the latest version from

http://mediabee.com/download/Mediabee-1.26.exe

If you’re interested in the thin client installer you can find it at

http://mediabee.com/download/Mediabee_Client-1.26.exe (NOTE: this requires a main Mediabee installation on the same network to work.)

A brand new look-and-feel, lots of bug fixes, and up-to-date help are the main features of version 1.25. All users are strongly advised to upgrade to this version, as a couple of bugs that were resulting in loss of data in the previous versions have been fixed.

The performance is better, and it is less demanding on the system as well.

The download.com link will be updated by end of day on July 16, 2005. Until then, please download the product from:

http://mediabee.com/download/Mediabee-1.25.exe

The latest version of Mediabee was just published today.

It’s fast, stable, easier on the eye, and a pleasure to work with - especially the new Buzz-It^TM Pad, which allows you to go to many different apps from one place with great ease.

Be sure to download it immediately, and don’t forget to tell everyone about Mediabee.

We just released Mediabee Version 1.11. It fixes one important bug that could have your calendar showing empty, so everyone is urged to upgrade to this version as soon as possible.

You can download it right from http://mediabee.com/download/download.html.

This version also offers a number of look-and-feel enhancements, bug fixes, and even includes RSS feeds (although they’re not customizable in this version).

What is Mediabee Web Access?

Mediabee Web Access (MWA) is a “light” version of the Mediabee Desktop Client. This is a quick write-up of MWA. This and other material will be incorporated into the existing help documentation over time.

What do I need to run MWA?

To run MWA, you must first have Mediabee installed on a Windows XP or Windows 2000 machine. (A Linux version is expected to be released in the not-too-distant future.)

MWA is completely browser-based and can be used from any system that has Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Mozilla/Firefox 1.0+.

Does it work the same as Mediabee Desktop Client (MDC)?

MWA does not offer all the functions of MDC, but it offers some of the key functions that users have been asking for. MWA is meant for people who’d like to access their home calendar from work or vice versa. MWA could also be used, for example, to check on your children’s homework completion or your elder relative’s medication compliance (all standard disclaimers apply) - assuming that the children or your elder relative are checking off their completed tasks.

On what systems should I run MWA as opposed to Mediabee Desktop Client (MDC) or Mediabee Thin Client (MTC)?

As stated, you can run MWA anywhere. Let’s say you have a home network with some PCs, Macs, and Linux machines. You would run MDC on one of your PC (Windows) machines. Then you could run MWA on the other machines. MWA is light on system resource consumption, and can run on any operating system (OS) - including some older Windows machines.

Will MWA work with older versions of Mediabee?

You will need Mediabee Version 1.1 or higher to run MWA. You must be a registered user. If you registered Mediabee V1.0.13 or lower, you must re-register. To re-register, you should change the “location” field in the registration screen and click on the Register Now button.

How do I login to MWA?

Visit http://www.mediabee.com/login and you will see a button for Mediabee Web Access. Click on the button to open up a separate browser window from which you will login. You will need to have the following items from your Registration screen handy: email address, password, phone number, and location. The password and location are case-sensitive and must be typed in exactly as it appears in the Registration screen.

I’ve done everything, but it doesn’t seem to work?

If you see the message “Login failed. Try again.” then you should double-check the details from the Registration screen. You may need to re-register if you first registered using an older version of Mediabee.

If the browser appears to hang, it is likely that MDC is unable to connect to our server. This could be because your system or your firewall is preventing MDC to access port 5222.

If this error is happening immediately after you first tried to access MWA after you installed Version 1.1, you may need to reboot your system.

If you’re still having issues, please send an email to support@mediabee.com. As you know, this is still beta software, an we would appreciate your cooperation in ironing out any potential bugs.

We’re pleased to note that SoftPedia has certified that our application contains no spyware, adware, or malware. Go ahead, click on the image to find out what this means.

If you’re a user, you already knew this, of course.

Look for V1.0.13 to appear anytime now on download.com. This version has one major enhancement: WEATHER. To get a preview of how cool the new weather pages are, visit http://mediabee.com/weather.

If you like the page, bookmark it - after you’ve entered your own zipcode or, if you’re from outside the U.S., the “ICAO” code (to find out what it is, click on Global Weather).

This implementation is based on the great work done by the folks at Hamweather, LLC.

To make this change effective, once you’ve downloaded the new version, go to Settings->Registration and make sure that your zipcode field is correctly entered. If you’re not in the U.S., be sure to select your nearest weather station so that the left-hand-side panel shows you the correct weather info. Also, clicking on the weather icon will now automatically bring you the correct weather information - is that cool or what?

The various pieces of the application are slowly coming together nicely!

Expect another major release within a few days to make the list sharing behave more predictably and also so you can (if you choose to turn it on) access your home calendar from work or on the road with a browser.

If you like Mediabee, please be sure to tell all your friends about it. Better yet, please email them the following sentence:

“Check out this cool application! http://mediabee.com”

If you’re having any trouble with your application, remember, we’re here to help. Don’t automatically assume that we’ll eventually get to it! If we hear from you, we can prioritize our development accordingly. We’re VERY responsive, as some other customers who’ve complained will tell you. You can contact us by putting in a note on our forum http://mediabee.com/forum or sending us email at support@mediabee.com.

Here are some sneak peeks at the new weather pages:

All users are encouraged to download this release asap.

In addition to a number of minor bug fixes, this release features the following improvements:

1) Slightly better (but not complete) support for international users
2) Better disk usage. On Windows 2000, the application was causing disk fragmentation due to the caching of photos that were constantly rotating. This problem has been eliminated.
3) Main Page now features a preview of upcoming functionality that will allow you to manage ALL of life’s needs better. (download to find out what it is )
4) Weather panel should work now. If it doesn’t, visit Settings->Registration, make sure your zip code shows up correctly, and click on Register Now. For international users, the weather panel will be just a picture. But the weather icon on the tool bar should bring up your country’s weather page.
5) The photo panel will no longer automatically show pictures from My Pictures. Visit the Settings->Photo Gallery area to select the main folders from which to display pictures. Or create a Mediabee folder under My Pictures and put the pics you want in there.
6) A new version the thin client installer is available at http://mediabee.com/download/Mediabee_Client-1.0.12.exe.
7) Every main application is also now a thin client - meaning, you can have multiple Mediabee installations on the same local network, and you can change the server by visiting Settings->Server Settings. This process is a bit slow, but it works. Just make sure that the client and server versions are compatible.

We got a 4-Cow rating at Tucows. We almost got to 5, but they’d like us to better integrate support & do a little better cleanup on uninstall before we can get there.

We’re happy as clams, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. There’s some truly awesome stuff coming down the pike that will show you what Mediabee is all about. Stay tuned.

A CNET downloader (”Damon”) made the following negative comment (exact quote): “…There are features that obviously require communication with the internet like weather, ect. but I decided it wasn’t a good idea to have a personal planner with my whole family’s personal information and plans communicating with the internet…Not for me.”

The downloader is apparently fearful that we’re storing the family’s schedules on the Internet. This is simply not true. If you use a web-based calendar such as Yahoo® or MSN®, those services depend on hosting your data on their servers. Not so with Mediabee. If you look at our privacy policy, we clearly state what is sent to our servers and what is not. Very little of your information is kept on our servers. All of your scheduling information is actually kept on your machine.

As the user himself admits, we access weather information from the Internet. We also keep a connection to the Internet in case any of the calendars you subscribe to changes and your copy needs to be updated.

Please send a note to support at mediabee dot com to request the thin client installer. You can use the thin client installer for client-only installations in a home network where one machine already has the standard Mediabee installation.

The thin client will work on lesser machines, because, obviously, it’s less demanding than the full install.

A download.com user apparently likes the product, but hates the fact that they cannot choose which photos will show up in the photo panel. I guess it was enough of a negative that they’ve given us bad marks. We’re already at work making that more configurable and will let you know when it’s done. (That fix won’t make it to V1.0.7, which is on queue to be uploaded to download.com.)

In the meantime, if you’d really rather turn off the photo panel, here’s a quick way to do it. (When you upgrade, this change will be reset. So wait for V1.0.8 or higher to upgrade.)

Find the Mediabee/src/ui/TopRightPanel.html file and make the following small change in it. Look for the string onload=”refreshDisplay()” and very carefully delete just that string and save the file. Now close and reopen the application.

Et voila. The photo panel will be empty (sorry) until the fix arrives.

We brought in 2005 with 2000 downloads in 2 weeks! It’s going to be an exciting year as people really begin to understand and use the power of Mediabee. We’re looking forward to a quiet revolution in calendaring!

Expect Version 1.0.6 in a couple of days - making it much more robust!

Today we released version 1.0.4. As of this afternoon, there were 771 downloads! Looks like we have a 100% good rating so far, with 6 votes.

It seems we have users now in Finland, Australia, and UK, not to mention all over the U.S.

Drop us a note if you need any help, given that you can do so much with it! We’re especially anxious to get communities started in seeding the community-related schedules. Don’t forget, we’re here to help.