About Spanning Sync
A small Mac utility with one job, made in Austin, Texas.
The idea
In 2006 a Mac user's calendar lived in iCal and, increasingly, in Google Calendar as well. Keeping the two in agreement meant exporting and importing by hand, or giving up on one of them. Spanning Sync was built to make that problem disappear: install it once, pair your calendars, and stop thinking about it.
The company was founded by Charlie Wood and based in Austin, Texas. The product went through a private beta in late 2006 and shipped as version 1.0 on March 12, 2007. Contact sync with Google Contacts arrived in version 2.0 in September 2008, and Spanning Sync 3 brought group sync, finer control and a much faster engine.
What came after
As Google's own tools matured, the company turned its attention to a different gap: protecting the data people kept in Google's cloud. It took the name Spanning Cloud Apps and built a backup service for Google Apps. Spanning Sync received its final update, version 3.3, in July 2012, and the sync service was retired on June 19, 2013.
Today spanningsync.com remains online as the home for the product's feature descriptions, release history and support notes, for the many people who still search for them.
Timeline
| Nov 2006 | Limited private beta |
| Mar 2007 | Spanning Sync 1.0: iCal ↔ Google Calendar, $25/year or $65 once |
| Sep 2008 | Spanning Sync 2.0: Address Book ↔ Google Contacts, sync-on-change |
| 2010 | Spanning Sync 3: contact groups, selective sync, up to 10× faster |
| Jul 2012 | Spanning Sync 3.3, the final release |
| Jun 2013 | Service discontinued |