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eHub Interviews AirSet

Thanks to Brian Dougherty, CEO of AirSet for this email interview posted November 14, 2005.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

AirSet: AirSet is a Lifeware service. Our goal is to simplify our users’ lives by letting them manage all of the important information, for all of the important people in their lives, all in one place. AirSet provides a shared address book, calendar, to do lists, blogs, and web links. Unlike existing online group management solutions that treat each group as a silo, AirSet is designed to let you manage all of the important groups in your life at once; easily sharing information from one group to the next when appropriate. For example, when you place travel plans for a conference on your work group calendar, with one click you can share that event to your Family calendar so your spouse will know you will be out of town.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

AirSet: Most of us needed this service ourselves. If you have school age children, the schedule coordination between work, home, school, sports teams, boy scouts, girl scouts, etc. is incredibly difficult. AirSet brings sanity to this chaos.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth?  Do you have a day job?

AirSet: We are 1000% committed to this effort. It’s our day job, our night job, and our weekend job. We dream about making AirSet better.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

AirSet: We’re a 13 person company. I founded and took public two previous ventures - Geoworks and Wink Communications. Most of the team are individuals who worked with me at those earlier ventures.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

AirSet: The primary insight that drives our design is that our lives revolve around a small number of important groups: our immediate family, our work/school colleagues, and a handful of social groups—sports teams, faith groups, and volunteer organizations. Our goal with AirSet is to create a web application suite that is rich enough to manage all of these groups. By offering it for free we lower the barriers to adoption so our users can get as many of the important groups in their lives as possible to adopt the service. Just as Microsoft Office is a horizontal integrated productivity suite for desktops, we are looking to build the best horizontal integrated group management suite available on the web.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

AirSet: Linux, MySQL, Tomcat, Java, Ajax, J2Me, Brew

eHub: What are the most requested features from your users/community?

AirSet: Additional ways to manipulate and view calendar data.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

AirSet: Amazingly we are being used all over the world, even though we only started promoting the service a few months ago. We have users ranging from China to Eastern Europe. We recently found out that we were featured on an Australian television show. It is amazing how things spread on the web.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months?  The next 2 years?

AirSet: In the next 6 months we will continue to improve the web service adding richer calendar features, new capabilities like shared file storage, and integration with other web services like Skype. We will also launch our first mobile clients for AirSet. Longer term we expect to see product development driven by the requests of our user base.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

AirSet: We are a small company. We believe we are building a great product, but getting awareness for that product is a challenge on a limited marketing budget. We will need to raise outside funding to properly market the service.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

AirSet: The next major phase for us is launching our mobile clients with the Mobile Carriers (Verizon, Cingular, Sprint, etc). We have one major carrier signed and we will launch with them within the next few weeks. We need to sign more carriers to distribution deals.

eHub: Do you have a business model?  If so, what is it?

AirSet: Our initial business model is to provide a great free web service and then up-sell a percentage of those users to a subscription service to get access to their data on their mobile phones.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

AirSet: We do not disclose this information for competitive reasons.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

AirSet: We are really making a difference in a lot of people’s lives. We have gotten great feedback from our early users about how much AirSet is helping them manage their families, businesses, churches, teams, etc. While we haven’t started to generate real revenue yet, the psychic income has been fantastic.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

AirSet: I think the array of services available on the web today is amazing and we are only getting started. The applications that are coming to let us communicate with people all over the world and share information is changing the world. It’s going to be a great ride.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

AirSet: Google, WSJ, Washington Post, and while not a site, I use the Skype client every day.

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

AirSet: 6.

Thanks to Brian Dougherty, CEO of AirSet for this email interview posted November 14, 2005.

Visit AirSet
Originally added to eHub on Sep 22, 05

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eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

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