What is 5Qs?

5Qs is a brand-new platform for emerging brands, startups and my personal favourite – apps! I’ll be talking to developers and entrepreneurs in their beta and maybe some even in their alpha stage and asking them five questions – how much can you learn about something in five questions? Well, that’s the point! The idea isn’t about knowing EVERYTHING but understand a little about the service and the people behind it as they’re figuring it out for themselves too!

Magneto!

Right, the first time I came across the app the first thing that occurred to me was X-Men but hey, that’s just me! However, it’s almost like having superpowers with this smart calendar management app! Yes, it’s a calendar ‘management’ app and not just a calendar. I never talk about anything unless I have used it first so I was given beta access to the app to try out for a little while and have seen it dramatically alter the way I schedule events and plan my day. For instance, I never have to be late because it tells me if the traffic is bad and the seamless syncing of to-do lists with the calendar makes my day run smoothly as I don’t have to keep switching between apps. If you’re an app freak like me, you probably have far more productivity apps than you actually use anyway!

Even though they’re still in their beta stage I was able to sneak a little interview with Gadi Shamia who is the Co-Founder and CEO of Magneto and here it is…

1. What is the ethos behind Magneto? I mean, why another calendar app when there are already so many out there? 

One of the neat things about Magneto is that it’s an entire server-based calendar system, not just an app. Its power is in what it can do in the cloud — true sync with Exchange, the Busy Blocker, drive times, and traffic monitoring are examples of things you just can’t do on the phone. We love to see all the action that’s happening in the calendar space — some of the other players have made really nice UI plays.

But ultimately when we looked at what was broken with calendars, we realized that they needed more than just a makeover. The calendar data model hasn’t changed in almost two decades. So if you’re just doing a UI play, you’re limited by 20-year-old constraints on behaviour and functionality. That wasn’t good enough for us. We took a hard look at the problems people have and we had to really build a lot of new technology to make it work.

  • Magneto adds predictive travel times to your meetings so you can plan to leave on time for your meetings. Then we monitor your trips so you can change your plans according to traffic.

  • Magneto lets you share a snapshot of your calendar so you can schedule with less back-and-forth emailing.

  • Magneto integrated smart to-dos so you can manage your task list directly from the calendar and block time to get things done.

So in short, our ethos is primarily on the underlying behaviour of calendars and the underlying technology that will make them much better tools for the people who use them.

2. Are there any plans for any new supporting apps behind the scenes?

Because Magneto isn’t just an app, it’s pretty easy to extend the Magneto system to new clients. We are definitely planning an Android app, for example.

3. If there’s one dream function you could add to Magneto what would it be?

We are building our dreams — this is the benefit of being a startup! Many of the features you see in Magneto, like drive times and to-dos, exist because of people’s real frustrations with their calendar systems. We experienced these personally and as we interviewed people and got customer feedback, we found that it wasn’t just us, and built Magneto.

Since calendars are so central to people’s lives, we do get many feature requests on a daily basis. Some of them are straightforward like adding public transit times to our driving time feature, which we just released. Others are more inspirational, like turning the driving time feature into a carpool management system, or integrating with project management systems. We wish we could build everything!

We definitely have much bigger plans up our sleeves, although we’re not ready to talk about them just yet.

 

4. When is Magneto due for public release?

We’re using the beta period as time get feedback and fine-tune Magneto’s features. Once we feel we’ve gotten the right mix, we’ll launch publicly.

5. Anything special you’d like to add? :)

Feedback from our customers is one of the most important parts of our business. We’re so lucky to have such a passionate base of people using Magneto — they’re willing to spend time giving us suggestions and feedback that will help make Magneto great. We love our users!

 

A Big Thanks!

Huge thanks and much, MUCH support to Gadi and the rest of the team. I’m sure there are so many wonderful people out there working on exciting projects, if you know of someone and think they would love to be part of 5Qs please send me a message or post a comment below. Besides being an app freak I’m also a productivity nerd, so are they any productivity hacks you got out of this interview or have of your own? Let me know!