Tempo is launching a new version of its smart calendar app today with a feature called Insights, which provides a lot more information about the people you’re scheduled to meet.
The app, which first launched a year ago and emerged from research institute SRI (which also incubated voice-powered assistant Siri), already displayed basic information about the people connected to a meeting, like their contact information and links to their social networking profiles.
With the update, however, contact profiles are now split into two tabs: Contact Details and Insights. And the Insights are much more in-depth. They can include information like your most recent email exchanges, past and future meetings, CrunchBase data about the companies they work for, AngelList data, and more information from their social networking profiles.
I asked CEO Raj Singh why Tempo needed to build a separate tab for this, rather than just adding information to the existing profiles, and he said they serve two different purposes — profiles allow you to reach out to someone, while the Insights feature is more about giving you information that helps build relationships: “We’re trying to call out the most important details.”
Another interesting point about Insights is the fact that it takes advantage of the “Tempo graph” — in other words, it’s not just showing mutual connections from LinkedIn and Facebook, but from Tempo as well.
Singh has suggested in the past that he wants to do more with Tempo’s data, turning it into less of a calendar app, per se, and more of a personal assistant built on top of a calendar. Insights and the Tempo Graph move the app further in that direction, as do other additions called Smart Alerts and Morning Alerts.
Like other calendar apps, Tempo could already alert you to upcoming events, but Smart Alerts allow users to perform the most common action associated with a particular meeting type with just one tap — right now, that includes auto-dialing a conference call, checking your flight status, navigating to a location, contacting a person, and reading about a company. (Call me lazy, but I love Tempo’s auto-dialing feature, and now it’s getting even more convenient.) Morning Alerts, meanwhile, aren’t tied to a specific event, but are instead daily reminders to wish friends a happy birthday and review your schedule.
You can download the new Tempo app here.