SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 6, 2006—Eighty-Three Degrees, Inc. today announced the public beta of their new social calendaring application, 30 Boxes. The company is the latest collaboration by Julie Davidson, Nick Wilder, and Narendra Rocherolle who formed the management team of Webshots, which sold to CNET Networks in 2004.
30 Boxes aims to find a niche among several trends in software development. It uses a calendar application as the interface to building a tight social network and passive communication tool. It is lightweight and web based, but making use of newer technologies to give it more of a desktop feel.
30 Boxes offers a powerful natural language processing engine that allows complex calendar entries with a single text box. It provides elegant event scheduling and calendar sharing using tags to segment events and privacy options. As a social network, the product passively builds shared buddy cards that aggregate additional date-based information such as an individual’s Flickr photos, MySpace comments, or Upcoming.org events.
“We started out by building a very usable calendar that allowed you to share your schedule with people you trust and we stumbled upon a lot of other features that make this a unique experience,” said Nick Wilder.
The company plans to release an extensive developer’s API as well as stuctured data outputs to allow syndication and new applications by third party developers.
30 Boxes is now open for beta testing at http://30boxes.com and will continue to evolve over the next several weeks.
About Eighty-Three Degrees, Inc.
Eighty-Three Degrees, Inc. (http://www.83degrees.com) is a small software firm exploring online consumer applications with an eye for improving the user experience, eliminating complexity, and making use of increasingly open systems.