Mapenda looks to connect brands to customers via calendars

This month, Mapenda launched its custom Calendar application in France. The service allows brands to create custom themes for calendars, allowing them to integrate their events calendars with your own. The product, developed by founder & CEO Sophia Burnett, the application looks to revolutionize how we organize our agendas, while allowing for easier communication between users and the brands they love. Mapenda is apart of the Microsoft Bizspark program, and has also gone through the Founders Institute. Mapenda isavailable for free to all users, and allows for brands, companies, organizations,  and others to pay to create their own ‘skin’ for the calendar, to place in a Web Store, where users can pick and choose their themes.
I am a huge fan of fixing calendars, as I think there is a disconnect between events that happen and the people we have them with, in terms of organization and data gathering. Looking at Mapenda, it’s clear that there is something to be had here: whether they have hit it just yet will be up to users to decide via feedback. Giving the product a whril, I was a little disappointed to find that I couldn’t integrate my Google Calendar into Mapenda – or at least it wasn’t clear how to do so. I think they’ll have a big problem with network effect if that can’t make some integration capbilities simple. I highly loathe Google’s plain calendar view, and am constantly looking for something that can make checking my appointments not such a pain in the butt.
Mapenda plans to have a mobile version out by the end of the year – given its aesthetic focus, it may prove useful on mobile, where aesthetic and design rules. If you’re interested in overhauling your calendar, you should definitely take a look at Mapenda!