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.