We are very excited to introduce, and give you a little preview of the first application from Wikid Labs. It’s called Reveille, and it is going to add some great new features to 37signals’ Backpack application that aren’t available today.

Before we tell you more about the features, we want to explain a little of the history behind the idea for Reveille.  We have been happy users of 37signal’s Basecamp and Backpack for about two years. In fact, we’ve used Basecamp to manage the development of Reveille.  The idea for Reveille came as Greg’s wife was trying to move the family calendar completely into Backpack from iCal on her Mac, but was finding the management of reminders to be a bit of a challenge.  She wanted an easier way to add the reminders she was used to having, for instance, reminders for friends birthdays, or other important appointments. The solution hit Greg one day, late October, in the place where all good ideas seem to come, the shower.

What we’ve ended up developing is a system for being able to automatically create reminders for Backpack calendar events by using special hashtags in the event names.  For example, you might want to create an event for an important meeting and be reminded of it two hours prior. Today, you have two choices in Backpack for doing this.  You could use the built-in event reminders set for 30 minutes before the event, which may not remind you when you want. Or, you could manually add a reminder for the event, which is way too much work in our opinion.  The new option, using Reveille, is to create your event and somewhere in the event name you would include ‘#rem2hrs’. When Reveille scans your calendar it will pick up the hashtag and add a reminder two hours before the event for you.  And, even better, it means there’s no limit to the number of reminders per event. You can add as many reminder hashtags as you care to.  We found this to be a great shortcut for managing calendar reminders, and we hope you will too.

Just to summarize, Reveille’s main features are:

1. Automatic reminder creation for calendar events from within Backpack or any other Backpack app that allows the creation of calendar events.
2. Easily create multiple reminders for a calendar event just by using more hashtags
3. See and manage your reminders, shown in relationship to your calender events, from a simple interface within Reveille.

Reveille isn’t publicly available just yet, so check out our website to signup for our email newsletter, and follow us on Twitter so that we can keep you up to date on the release of Reveille, and exclusive discount offers.  We hope you’re as excited as we are about using Reveille to streamline your calendar experience in Backpack.  We totally welcome your feedback, so please let us know what you think.