Allcal
6851 NE Loop 820
North Richland Hills 76810
The number of times that mobile app Allcal has been downloaded mirrors a classic line from the Japanese cartoon Dragon Ball Z — “It’s over 9,000!”
Only fitting then that the app’s founder and CEO, Daniel Cocanougher, was once the owner of FUNimation, a company that produced Japanese programs such as Dragon Ball Z for American television. He left FUNimation in 2007 and went on to found numerous businesses in the years following. Cocanougher now runs Allcal with his daughter Danielle, who serves as vice president.
Allcal is a free scheduling app that allows users to create calendars that either a single person or a group of people can use. That way, if someone makes a change on the group calendar, each person connected to the calendar receives a notification that a change has been made. The app has several other features as well, such as “Estimated Time of Arrival,” which uses a phone’s location services to show how many minutes away a person is from an event.
Allcal was launched in May 2014, but before that, Daniel Cocanougher had to convince his daughter to leave her job in television news production and join him in the mobile app business. So he invited her to lunch at Japanese restaurant Tei-An in Dallas.
“That’s a very far drive for him and very weird,” Danielle Cocanougher said. “I already knew something was up.”
During lunch, her father pulled out his phone and showed her the prototype of the app. Seeing how it worked, she was quickly convinced that he was onto something special.
“I immediately knew that if I didn’t become a part of it, that I would be kicking myself later,” she said. “It looked like something that could really change the way that people plan their lives.”
That same week, she quit her job and decided to work for Allcal full time.
Over a year later, the app has been downloaded more than 9,000 times and currently is the No. 2 social planning app for iPhone worldwide, according to app ranking website App Annie.
The app can be found online and in the iOS App Store, and the Allcal team is working to make it available for Android by the end of 2015, Daniel Cocanougher said.
He said he hopes Allcal will be able to create a large public calendar that features events all around Dallas-Fort Worth. Beyond personal and small-group use, businesses and organizations can use the app to create public calendars that every Allcal user has access to.
In March, the University of Texas at Austin used Allcal for RoundUp, a three-day event filled with concerts, charity fundraisers and other activities hosted by fraternities and sororities.
Cienna Taylor, a UT sophomore who attended RoundUp, said she had a “great first impression” when she started using the app. She also uses it for her organization, Texas THON, which raises money for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals in Austin.
“It was incredibly user friendly,” she said. “It synced up incredibly well with iPhone users, which is what I am. It made it really easy for me to branch out to a community that I wanted to partake in their activities. I would recommend it to anybody.”
The Fort Worth Opera has also teamed up with Allcal, creating a public calendar where app users can view all of the opera’s events. The entrepreneurial event Dallas Startup Week, which will take place April 12-16, will also use Allcal for its schedule of activities.
Though Allcal is one of the main focuses for the Cocanougher family, the father and daughter haven’t lost touch with their FUNimation roots. They run Allcal in the North Richland Hills office that used to house FUNimation before the production company moved to Flower Mound.
In some ways, Danielle Cocanougher was already working for her dad at FUNimation when she was a child, voicing some of the minor characters in the English dubbings.
“She was actually very good at voices,” Daniel Cocanougher said.
Now 26, she and her dad work as a team in a new kind of business. But whether family member or not, Daniel Cocanougher said, he wants every employee at Allcal to have an entrepreneurial mindset. The company has five full-time employees, plus 10 contract workers in Romania who handle programming.
“Our strategy is, it’s not just family members, it’s everybody,” Daniel Cocanougher said. “Everybody that works here has to be an entrepreneur, and be thinking about how they can not only help the product but, in general, make money and do something good for mankind.”