News & Information

Kiko: Business calendar features and uses

The Small Business Trends blog has an interesting post about the business features of the 30 Boxes and RSS Calendar services - both great calendar apps, each with a slightly different focus.

I am not sold on 30 Boxes as a calendar for business usage. It is a tad too geeky and seems to get sidetracked on the social networking elements... Other calendar applications have more bells and whistles. But for pure simplicity and for public events, RSS Calendar seems streamlined.

- Small Business Trends

This got me to start thinking a bit about Kiko's features and how you might have similar issues, concerns or feedback about how you use it, how it does or doesn't support what you are trying to do. Interestingly, Kiko offers many of the features that I think Anita Campbell (SBT's editor) is looking for in a business calendar app. Plus, the Kiko Event service makes it really easy to publicize the public aspects of your schedule.

Fun with the Kiko API and Ruby, Part 1

If you're a programmer and you've been wondering about the Kiko API and are also curious about Ruby, you're in luck! Over at the Tucows Blog, I've posted the first in a series of articles titled Fun with the Kiko API and Ruby.

Kiko: Migration Done!

Update to our migration note from last week. Everything went really smoothly over the weekend and the migration is 100% finished. You will notice that Kiko’s calendar services are much more responsive now.

 

Kiko: Upgrade and Migration Notice

Just a quick note to let you know that we’re performing some much needed upgrades to the Kiko infrastructure today and through the weekend. The entire application and all user data is in the process of being moved from its currently shared server setup to dedicated infrastructure inside of Tucows Network Operations Center. We are also undertaking a pretty extensive set of performance optimizations to the Kiko calendar code, the operating system, database, yada yada….

The net net for you is that you will experience some turbulence over the next few days as we migrate to the new environment and stabilize the system. All data will be migrated, so no worries there – you will not have to do anything on your end. If you are trying to check your calendar and you get no response from Kiko’s servers, just sit tight as it probably means that you’ve walked into the middle of the migration activities.

We fully expect the system to be locked down into our environment by the end of this weekend.

Welcome Kiko Subscribers!

If you haven’t heard the news already, Tucows was in fact the high bidder in the recent eBay auction of the wonderful Kiko Calendar and Kiko Events services.

The shiny new Tucows blog has the scoop on why Tucows jumped into the fray, which mostly centers around Tucows integrating the Kiko application into its hosted email and outsourced domain registration businesses.

Kiko Calendar and Kiko Events are currently both services that are running in the real world, being used by real customers. This aspect of the business will be absorbed into Tucows recently reinvented “Retail Services Group” – the business unit that is also responsible for managing the Domain Direct, NetIdentity and Blogrolling.com services.

Our short-term plan for Kiko Calendar and Kiko Events is to first stabilize the environment inside our network operations center (get it hooked up to our 24x7 network monitoring processes, bring in some premium gear and bandwidth, etc.) From there we will be introducing some bug fixes and tweaks that we definitely need to get out of the way (like the broken link that gets sent out when you invite someone to a meeting).

Kiko Calendar and Kiko Events are both free services – we have no plans to change this. We will be working on integrating these free services with our other retail services (i.e. Domain Direct and NetIdentity users will have access to their Kiko calendar from inside their webmail, Blogrolling.com users will see Kiko features pop up in their control panels, and so on…)

We are committing to a solid evolution of these services while ensuring a high level of service reliability and support. As we move through the product integration over the coming weeks, we will definitely make sure that you all are kept in the loop.

As always, if you have any questions, be sure to send us an email or leave us a comment.