Google's newest acquisition is Timeful, a popular third-party calendar app for iOS. The company says that it will bring the app's smart scheduling features to Google Calendar, Inbox and more.
Timeful essentially analyzes the user's schedule and then uses that information to help the user achieve their larger goals.
"You can tell Timeful you want to exercise three times a week or that you need to call the bank by next Tuesday, and their system will make sure you get it done based on an understanding of both your schedule and your priorities," said Google in a statement. "We're excited about all the ways Timeful's technology can be applied across products like Inbox, Calendar and beyond, so we can do more of the work for you and let you focus on being creative, having fun and spending time with the people you care about."
Google isn't the first company to express interest in Timeful. The app attracted $6.8 million in funding from the likes of Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, being released as an app to the public in March 2014. Yoav Shoham, who sold another startup called Katango to Google in 2011, along with Dan Ariely and Jacob Bank, started it. It is currently unknown exactly how much Google paid for Timeful, but the acquisition includes employees from the company, along with Bank, Timeful's CEO, who is set to join Google as a product manager.
Timeful takes a very unique approach to scheduling events. While users can enter conventional times for events, they can also tell the app ongoing projects and things that need to get done during the week. It will then identify appropriate times for individual events and will monitor the progress of certain tasks on an ongoing basis.
Google's Calendar app could benefit enormously from this kind of functionality. Calendar recently got a user interface refresh with Android Lollipop, however, its functionality has largely remained the same over the past few years. With this purchase, Google will essentially be adding a kind of artificial intelligence to Calendar.
Google also said that it would be adding functionality from Timeful into its new email app Inbox, which could certainly be an interesting addition. Only time will tell exactly how Google will implement the technology into Inbox, however, it is likely that Google Now will be able to detect events and projects within emails and schedule them accordingly.
While the Timeful iOS app will still be available, it is unlikely that there will be any updates to the app in the future.
