Before starting TimeBridge in May 2005, Yori Nelken interviewed over 300 busy professionals. The main finding: about 70% said that scheduling a meeting takes longer than the length of the meeting itself.

In fact, a busy professional schedules about eight meetings per week. Nelken saw this as an opportunity to build a new company. "I really started the company to make information workers more productive," he said. "I also knew it was important to make sure the solution worked within people's everyday processes and desktop applications."

True, there are many scheduling products on the market. However, they are generally not helpful in finding a time that works for everyone. For example, Microsoft Corporation's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Outlook allows you to send an appointment to a person or a group -- that is, so long as you already know the time. Or, Exchange shows the free/busy information of people -- but only for your company.

Basically, TimeBridge is a one-step scheduler. From Outlook, you create an email that is addressed to participants in a meeting and then click the TimeBridge toolbar button, which brings up a sidebar calendar where you can propose 5 meeting times. "The proposed times are expressed within the email itself," said Nelken. "After selecting the times, organizers send the email. Participants receive an email and click on the link which takes them to the TimeBridge-provisioned online meeting space where they indicate their availability from the choices provided by the organizer. Once everyone has responded, the system automatically confirms the best time and notifies all participants. If the organizer chooses, they can turn off the auto-confirmation and manually select the best time. For the organizer, the tentative times are automatically removed from their calendar, leaving only the confirmed time... And the meeting is scheduled."

Nelken crafted the idea as an entrepreneur-in-resident at Mayfield. "I have long been fascinated by helping people improve their productivity and developing solutions to everyday problems," he said. "Once the idea for TimeBridge came to me, Mayfield was immediately supportive and seeded the idea."

This may be a very interesting company to watch in the future. A few months ago, Mayfield and Norwest Venture Partners invested $6 million in the new company.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and operates InvestorOffering.com.