This weekend, my friend Mark pointed me to the ‘new page in the Trumba story’. Trumba is a calendaring service that allows organisations to publish, promote and communicate events online. On 18 October 2006, they announced a radical shift in their market. They are no longer interested in individuals, small businesses and not-for-profit organisations. They’re going after ‘larger organizations and businesses’ who ‘are paying us $100 per month or more because they see the positive impact our tools have on their online event marketing efforts’.

This means that their base paid service price (which was $39.95 per year) is now $1199.40 per year. A 30 fold increase. There’s no longer a free version either. However, Trumba have given users plenty of notice, and they can export their data.

But, there are currently over 3,500 public Trumba calendars. That’s a lot of users. A lot of people who might blog about this change in direction. 37signals talk about people growing out of their products, but this is the first time I’ve known a Web 2.0 company to outgrow their customers. Customers are truly one of the most valuable assets for a business (why else would Google buy YouTube, or Fox buy MySpace), so it’s a remarkable decision to take.

Is there an alternative? Yes. There are a lot of calendaring tools around and the comments on the Trumba blog indicate the alternatives that people are considering switching to.

Kiko joined the TechCrunch DeadPool recently. Which calendaring solution is next?