Backed by Y Combinator and SV Angel (outside of Start Fund), Noteleaf helps you prepare for meetings, in one of the more novel ways I have seen. Launching today, the service pulls information from your Google Calendar and LinkedIn accounts inorder to send you comprehensive notifications of what you need to do, where you need to do it and who you need to do it with.
“But wait?” you say. “Doesn’t Google already do that through email notifications?” Noteleaf goes a step further, using machine learning technology to read your calendar entries and build you a mobile profile of your meeting, complete with LinkedIn profile and work history of the person it guesses you’re meeting with. In addition, you get a link to a thread of every email you’ve ever exchanged with the person and a map of the meeting’s location.
(Note: The app only works with your default Google Calendar, and as a user with multiple Google accounts I had some trouble toggling back and forth between my different accounts.)
Says co-founder Jake Klamka, “If you’re running late for a meeting it’s painful to open Gmail or open LinkedIn to figure out who this person is. Here you’ve got it happening in one click.”
The app texts you with a link to your meeting “dossier” 10 minutes before your meeting, both as a reminder and a way to brush up fast on the personal details of the person. This is awesome if you’ve got back to back meetings and don’t have the time to background research and especially useful in the tech industry, where everyone’s done something important.
While you could improve its chances by entering the person’s whole name, the app has 80% accuracy rate in guessing who you’re meeting with, even if you write something vague like “Lunch with Paul.”
But Klamka and co-founder Wil Chung tell me that the most important aspect of this is the emphasis of the mobile experience, “There’s little things, that people expect to work on mobile that don’t really work that well, like pulling up location on a map or finding emails in Gmail. It’s a painful experience on mobile, small keyboard, you have to launch multiple apps.”
The founders eventually plan on adding even more information into the dossier, like a user’s Twitter account, so you can become well-versed in not just where people worked, but what they did over the weekend — Great for building rapport.