There's a whole discipline, called queuing theory, on scheduling service to cope with intermittent demand.

FORBES: Hurry Up And Wait

But thanks to online doctor appointment scheduling service services like ZocDoc and DocASAP, your odds of meeting such urgent medical needs are rising.

FORBES: DocASAP Vies For Top Spot in MD Scheduling

As of this summer, only 1 percent or 2 percent of America's Best customers used the e-scheduling service, but Halpern expects that number will grow to between 5 percent and 10 percent once the company completes its rollout of ServeClick software from Connectria.

CNN: Analysis: Brace yourself for the e-scheduling revolution

Bringing their audience and advertisers to the table, established publishers are now partnering with these full-service firms that handle all the grunt work of deal sites like production, scheduling, customer service, etc. so the publisher can keep doing what it does best: creating great content.

FORBES: The Trouble With Groupon: Daily Deal Sites Need To Go Local

E-scheduling can help service providers identify and reward their most frequent customers.

CNN: Analysis: Brace yourself for the e-scheduling revolution

For businesses that rely on text messaging to manage complex scheduling challenges, Zipwhip's service is invaluable.

ENGADGET: Zipwhip endows existing landlines with the ability to send and receive texts

Enterprises can deploy M2M technology now to reduce the cost of field service management through remote maintenance, they can optimize fleet scheduling with real-time location and traffic data and they can tap into new business models such as usage-based (or pay-as-you) go billing.

FORBES: The Massive M2M Business Opportunity (Part 3)

The BBC said a "significant saving" in changes to arts scheduling will ensure that arts coverage "maintains prominence and relevance on the World Service".

BBC: World Service to lose 73 jobs