Tempo Smart Calendar

» see tempo.ai as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

tempo smart calendar shipped on iOS only. that put it outside my daily surface. still. i was on android for most of the 2013-2015 window, using google calendar for meetings and reminders in the basic way. tempo was the "smart" wrapper for people already deep in the iOS work-app orbit.

the app launched 13 february '13 from tempo AI, a spinoff of sri international in menlo park. sri is best known outside the industry as the birthplace of siri (which apple bought in 2010), and tempo's founding team leaned on the same context-aware AI research lineage. the pitch was that a calendar could pull information from your email and contacts, then preassemble the useful bits before you needed them, like dial-in numbers ready to tap and flight status on the morning of a trip.

tempo raised $12.5M in venture funding and shipped to reasonable early press. by 2014 it was one of a small class of AI-inflected calendar apps sitting in the app store alongside sunrise, which microsoft ended up buying in early 2015. the market shape was clear even then. the winners would be the ones acquired for their teams, not the ones that survived as products.

salesforce announced the acquisition on 29 may '15 and shut the app down on 30 june '15, one month later. the team went into salesforceIQ, the rebranded relateIQ business salesforce had bought the year before, and tempo the app never returned. it lived twenty-eight months.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the ancestry ~

tempo's real value was the CALO lineage. still. CALO stood for "cognitive assistant that learns and organizes," and was a DARPA-funded five-year sri research project (2003-2008) that studied how software could learn a user's routines and pre-fetch what they needed. siri was one commercial spinoff of that work. tempo was another. the pitch to salesforce was less about the app and more about handing over a team that could ship consumer-facing AI to enterprise buyers. to be honest.

~ the acquisition ~

the shutdown was clean. salesforce announced the buy on 29 may '15 with an app-death date thirty-two days later. anyway, users were told to export their calendar data before 30 june. after that the app opened to a wind-down screen and stopped syncing. this was the same shutdown pattern that mailbox had followed the year before under dropbox, a US venture-scale acquihire executed as a product death.

~ what remains ~

tempo's founding team stayed at salesforce for varying lengths of time. raj singh went on to found loop team in 2019, a virtual-office product that became pulse, a slack status tool, which mozilla acquihired in december 2022. the tempo.ai domain was pointed at salesforceiq.com/tempo, where a page confirmed in the past tense that the app had been discontinued and that anything left on the servers would be destroyed shortly after 30 june.

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