Back in June, Tempo announced that it had raised $10 million in funding with the goal of becoming what founder and CEO Raj Singh described as “the valedictorian of smart calendar apps.” Now it’s unveiling an update that he said gets the company “back to our roadmap.”
Since, Singh said much of the company’s energy has been spent building out the infrastructure to support new users. However, he has repeatedly claimed that Tempo’s real advantage will be the deep understanding that it gains of users and their calendars. And so he told me earlier this week that Tempo has been building out its artificial intelligence technology behind the scenes, and that the features launched today are the first to really show off the new capabilities.
Basically, when users have a meeting in Tempo, the app will now offer them a card with more data about wherever the person they’re meeting with works. The card will include things like a description of the company, recent news articles, directions to the office, and links to profile pages on Google News, Yahoo Finance, and CrunchBase. It will also list the other contacts users know who work at the company. And you don’t always need to explicitly state the company name in the meeting description — for example if I have a meeting set up with Raj Singh, the app can probably figure out that he works at Tempo.
This could be reasonably useful in and of itself, because it gives you some basic context ahead of your meeting. Singh said it also shows how Tempo is building up a graph connecting people, companies, and more. Individual users will only be able to see the small portion of the graph that they have access to via their contacts and correspondence, but it allows Tempo to surface useful data like the list of company contacts. In the future, he said Tempo can surface data and connections in other ways, for example by creating similar cards around events.
In addition, the new update is also supposed to allow users to send gifts from Tempo through a partnership with Yiftee, and it supports POP email.
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