Pajama Entrepreneur

Fantastical is what it claims to be a fantastic iCal. I have been using Fantastical now for over 2 weeks and I’m very pleased with it. Fantastical sits in my menu bar and gives me a quick way to view all my appointments for the week, plus it lets me enter a future appointment very easily. In fact I never opened iCal once in the past 2 weeks.

Fantastical was created by Michael Simmons and Kent Sutherland who are based in Roseville, California and Boston, Massachusetts. Here is a short Q&A with Michael.

Q: What inspired you to launch Fantastical?

A: We wanted to make Mac and iOS apps that are enjoyable and flexible. Apps with beautiful design and powerful yet easy functionality.

Q: Where do you see Fantastical within a year?

A: Since we launched, Fantastical has been featured on the Mac App Store and we’ve been consistently in the Top 150 Grossing list. In the next year, we’ll keep enhancing Fantastical with even more functionality and launch another product.

Q: Are you self-funded?

A: Yes, We are self-funded.

Check out Fantastical: http://flexibits.com/fantastical

You can buy it from their online store for $19.95.

Very cool idea. The missing elements are wine and tapas. Then it will be perfect.

UpOut is an online application that lets you find out what’s going on in your city. The interface is colorful and easy to navigate. At present they have New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Boston, Los Angeles, London, Austin, Miami and Las Vegas. You can find out what’s going on right now, later in the evening, during the week, for a variety of activities such as theatre, restaurants, bars, dating, outdoor, weird and more. The site launched on 1 July 2011. The founders are William King (aged 19) and Martin Shen (aged 21). They moved from Boston to San Francisco. I asked Martin what inspired them to start UpOut and here is what he says:

Will had just started dating a cutie and was looking for awesome things to do but was left with only the touristy stuff on Boston.com or restaurants on Yelp. Then, after spending many hours on blogs and asking friends, he found a Friday salsa class (link) and the rest is history.

In a year, Martin hopes that more people will use UpOut and when they’re wondering what to do in their city, they will say, “We’ll just UpOut it.”

Martin and William are bootstrapping their startup.

According to Techcrunch, enterprise software startup Taulia has raised $8.5 million in Series B funding led by DAG Ventures with Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures”. That brings the total that Taulia has raised to over $12M.

As readers of Pajama Entrepreneur recall, we interviewed co-founder Philip Stehlik in a profile about Taulia last January 2010.