Google Acquires Timeful Calendar App – Will Integrate Its Tech Into Inbox, Calendar, and More

Google just announced that it has acquired Timeful, an iOS-only calendar app that tries to help “organize your life by understanding your schedule, habits, and needs.” The announcement came via the Gmail blog, but Google mentioned that they plan to integrate the technology behind Timeful into Inbox, Calendar, and “beyond,” so you could see it help tie together all sorts of Google services. I can’t see anyone arguing with better service-to-service integration. 

Since Timeful has only ever been available on iOS, I can’t say that I’m all that familiar with it. With that said, it sounds like it is basically a one-stop shop for you to-dos, meetings, events, and habits. For example, you could tell it to remind you to “call the bank by next Tuesday” or that you want to “exercise three times per week” and it will attempt to find the time and spots for you to get these things done, based around your habits and other happenings. According to its iOS listing, Timeful uses “sophisticated algorithms to suggest the best times” to schedule things throughout the day, based on your available time, location and most productive hours.

Here is the full feature list:

• Everything comes together on your Calendar, seamlessly – events, meetings, to-dos, and repeating habits all appear in one place so you can see what is competing for your time
• Schedule your to-dos and habits by simply dragging them directly onto your calendar and get reminders to make progress when the time comes
• Timeful will help you schedule your day based on the patterns of your habits, upcoming deadlines, and time available to make progress on your big to-dos
• Make time for good habits – plan out your work, personal, wellness or other categories of habits that should appear multiple times per day, daily, weekly or monthly
• Protect time on shared calendars – schedule your to-dos or habits and they appear as “busy” on your work or personal calendar
• Sideline events to free up time – move events or whole calendars out of view that don’t need to take up your precious time on your schedule
• Sync with all your Calendars – Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, Yahoo! Calendar, Apple iCal and many others.

Below is the “basics” video of information about Timeful the iOS app, which should help give you a better understanding of the potential for its features to be integrated into Google services.

And again, this move doesn’t mean we are getting a Timeful Android app, it means that the tech is going to be used to improve current Google products.

Via:  Gmail Blog