It’s a familiar story: you take a call from a guy in company X who wants to talk business, but the brief conversation you have yields little more than the basic information. Well, if forewarned truly is forearmed, then savvy product managers will doubtless be interested to learn that Tempo – a smart calendar app that first appeared back in February – has announced some updates that could make the task of getting the gen on your fellow invitees just that bit easier.
Updating the tech
The update builds on existing features that saw the app surface usual staples such as email and social platforms (LinkedIn), as well as provide directions to the meeting. Now users are offered the chance to go a little deeper in the form of a digital card that gives them information about the place that the person they’re meeting with works at, as well as any news articles pertaining to the organization and options to check out any online profiles – should they exist – in places as august as Google News and Yahoo.
As far as CEO and founder Raj Singh sees it, this is the next step of a development process that has so far been engaged in rolling out the right infrastructure to support its users. He describes the new features as a process of ‘getting back to our roadmap’ and sees the main advantage of Tempo being in the detailed understanding it has of its users and their calendars. It’s certainly a product that’s gathering momentum as it goes – it was only June, after all, that Tempo managed to secure $10 million in funding.
Networking the future
Business development associates will be curious about the possibilities of the tech beyond targeted data, and predictably, there’s another part of the equation to consider. Singh was keen to emphasize that Tempo is looking to build networks of information by constructing a graph that connects individuals as well as companies. While individual users will only be able to access the parts of the graph that are related to their contacts, Tempo will be able to build connections between valuable data such as company contacts.
So what of the future? Well Singh has never seen the app as exclusively to be used in the world of business and sales claims that coming months may well see the company realize plans to surface ‘a lot’ of other types of data.
It seems that booking meetings just got a whole lot more interesting.