Last week I had lunch with AppSumo founder Noah Kagan. His service provides combo deals for SAAS web services. The deal space is certainly currently hot – of course those of us deal hunters know it has been hot for a long time.

Today I learned about a similar offering from a variety of popular Swiss startups. Their package deal website is called eKnife and offers premium accounts from Doodle, Memonic and Wuala. They describe the service as the “Swiss Army Knife” of web startups.

From the announcement, “The eKnife stands for Swiss efficiency and shows the leading role of Switzerland as a rising tech hub in Europe. ‘The bundle increases productivity and saves time and stress’, says Dorian Selz, co-founder of Memonic. ‘eKnife was born within four weeks from just an idea to a commercial offer of three successful Swiss online services. Could Swiss efficiency be more evident?’.”

The eKnife bundle includes:

• Wuala 10GB premium account
• Doodle premium account
• Memonic premium account

The total price for the services is CHF94 and the bundle is offered for CHF 59 ($61).

If you are new to any of these services, check out our previous coverage of Wuala, Memonic and Doodle.

Find more stories about: AppSumo, Doodle, Memonic, Switzerland, Wuala

Swiss-based online scheduling tool Doodle has announced the launch of Calendar Connect. Doodle explains what Calendar Connect is, “the new calendar interface brings everything that users need for scheduling into one constantly updated place and enables them to select dates and times for meeting requests in a visual way…Also, free and busy data can be shared on Doodle with selected contacts regardless of the calendar system in use. This makes the gap between otherwise disparate calendars even closer.”

You can easily connect your Doodle calendar with Google Calendar using what looks like oAuth. Both calendars will be connected — see the video below for an example of how the new calendar connect service works.

You can also connect with Yahoo Calendar and any other calendar service that supports an ICS calendar feed.

The Doodle team is also working on a private beta of the Outlook Calendar connector. Doodle self-reports over six month users per month are using their calendar service.

Find more stories about: Doodle, Google Calendar, Switzerland

Swiss-based online scheduling tool Doodle has announced the launch of Doodle Premium today. I would have preferred if they called it Super Doodle but I guess Doodle Premium will have to do. The last time we covered Doodle they were launching an online scheduling tool inside of Facebook.

Doodle and MyDoodle will remain free while the Doodle Premium will cost $28/year. Basically Doodle Premium allows the user to customize the look and feel of the site. It’s a way to personalize the events that Doodle users create and send to their participants. The price seems a bit on the high side as $9 or $14 feels about right but I am sure the Doodle team researched the right price. Pricing is always the hardest part of any business, whether web-based or brick-and-mortar.

The company also notes that Premium Doodle is ad-free and customers can also request personal information from their event participants, such as postal address, e-mail address, and phone number.

Find more stories about: Doodle, Switzerland, Web 2.0

Last month we reviewed a Swiss-based service named Moreganize. Our Swiss reporter, Corsin, noted that the biggest competition to Moreganize would come from another Swiss-based company, Doodle. Today Doodle has announced the launch of an event planning tool as a Facebook application.

It’s interesting to watch the event planning category move to a crowdsourced model where polls are used to find a time and date that meets the needs of the group. The Doodle Facebook application allows you to poll your friends around an event topic. Facebook friends will receive a message inside of Facebook and Doodle will send emails to your friends who don’t have Facebook accounts.

Here’s an example of the poll page:

Check out our coverage of other event-planning services including MyPunchbowl, Renkoo, Center’d, Coordinatr and GoLark. Also check out our coverage of technology in Switzerland.

Find more stories about: Doodle, Quick News, Reviews, startups, Switzerland