‘Smart’ seems to be the big buzzword in recent times. Smart thermostats? Check. Smart TVs? Check. Smart elevators? Check. Smart keys? Check. Smart calendars? Check.
Lowdown is the latest ‘smart’ service to hit our radar, launching for iPhone users just a few weeks back. While it is currently UK-only, plans are afoot to roll this out into other countries in the latter part of 2014, so now seems like a good time to get the lowdown, if you’ll pardon the pun, on what could become the next must-have mobile app for business folk around the world.
The lowdown on Lowdown
In the nuttiest of nutshells, Lowdown promises to know where you’ve been, where you’re going, who you’re meeting, and when you’re meeting them. It’s about surfacing contextual data that will be of use throughout the whole meeting process.
While Any.Do’s Cal app recently received a new feature to help you manage all your meetings, one of the problems with this was that most of it largely isn’t automated and requires manual intervention.
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Lowdown claims to know more about your meetings than you do – it not only shows where your meeting is, how to get there and how long it takes, but it also displays the photos and profiles of who you are meeting, delivering access to their LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, as well as their company summary and tweets.
To get the full benefits, you’ll need to sync up your meetings from your calendar, add your location for directions, contacts from your device, LinkedIn for business profiles, and Twitter for latest tweets.
But that in itself isn’t the main draw here. If you choose to connect your email account, it also analyzes your inbox to try and reel in any data associated with the meeting, including any prior exchanges that have taken place between attendees. Plus, it looks at contacts you have in common with others (via LinkedIn), helping to establish any additional shared interests.
It is still very early days though. There are still one or two bugs in there, for example the ability to add a meeting directly from within the app seems to be broken in this version. And given it’s currently restricted to UK shores, there is still a long way to go before we’ll know how this fares globally.
It’s also worth noting that although it does have a 30-day free trial period, if you want to sign-up to Lowdown for the full shebang, it’ll cost you £4.99 per month ($8.30), or an annual fee of £49.99 ($83.00).
As it happens, Lowdown is also participating in The Next Web’s Boost program at the TNW Europe Conference 2014. And you can grab your tickets for the full event now.
➤ Lowdown | App Store [UK only]
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