Six month after its launch in iTunes, Tempo AI has finally finished polishing off the core calendar functionality of its calendar app and is now ready to start building the contextual virtual assistant it originally set out to create. It’s starting out with a new Company Card feature that aggregates information from Yahoo Finance, Google News and CrunchBase about any business in your contact list or calendar.
I know what you’re thinking: Big whoop, Tempo is just compiling a digital fact feed. But CEO Raj Singh explained that the Company Card feature is just the beginning of Tempo’s efforts to create a social graph that maps out its users interactions with the people, business and activities around them. The Company Card is key step because it means Tempo not only identifies companies as distinct entities but it also understands that the relationships you have with them differ from yet are intertwined with the people in your address book.
Tempo on a smartphone
What does that mean for you? Well for starters Tempo knows a company has a location or locations and it knows it has employees, and that some of those employees are your contacts, and it can determine how those different contacts relate to each other within the context of your graph.
Talking to Singh, I got the impression Tempo is mining email, address books and public databases for a lot of information about these different relationships, but he wasn’t revealing any more specific details. But he did give me a few hints. He said he expects Tempo to eventually guide you in how you deal with a company. For instance, if you’re meeting Bob from Company A in the morning, you should invite Shirley, who also works at nearby Company B, to lunch at the corner café. But don’t talk about you meeting Bob with Shirley, because Company A is a competitor of Company B.
Singh said the next step for Tempo is to quantify events, such as conferences, social gatherings, company meetings and even football games. Once Tempo recognizes those three basic concepts – people, companies and events — it can start really going to town on your networking graph, Singh said.
As for other plans, Singh said Tempo is weighing an Android app, but what he really wants to avoid is going through the hassle of porting its app. Ultimately Tempo wants to build a virtual assistant not a calendar, and time spent porting is less time spent innovating, he said.
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