Meet Mynd: the iOS calendar app that keeps track of how you spend your time

Built by former Good Technology employees, Mynd helps users stay on top of their schedule and then lets them look back and see where they’ve been, who they met with and more.

           Yes, there’s another app about to launch that wants to help you stay productive and on top of your daily tasks and appointments. But this one, Mynd, also wants to help you decide if you’re spending your time wisely.

         Mynd goes live in the iOS App Store Wednesday morning, where it will be free to download. The app is a calendar that uses your contacts, maps, location, and Facebook, Evernote and LinkedIn accounts  to present a picture of what your day looks like. It will prompt you at the appropriate times to get ready for your next appointment; it’ll tell you when to leave for your doctor’s appointment in order to arrive on time, will dial you into your next conference call and show you the weather for where you’re going. It will also surface the Evernote notes that are related to particular meetings.

          When you open the app you aren’t presented with a traditional calendar view. You see a home screen of large panels that show you, all at once, your next upcoming appointment time, a picture of who you’re meeting with, the current weather report, the location you’re headed next, how many miles you’ve traveled today, and the number of appointments you have to go. It’s a lot of information elegantly presented. Instead of overwhelming the user with info, it actually makes the day seem manageable. Managing time is the app’s main feature. And its most important feature allows you to look back at the end of the day or page back through the week, get a quick summary and make a judgement about where you’ve been, who you met with, etc.

        “It’s at the core of what we’re about: time as the basis of presenting you with all sorts of relevant and interesting info about how you’re spending this valuable commodity of time,” Max Wheeler, founder and CEO told me.

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App to tell where you will exactly be in future

                 
            NEW YORK: Do you know precisely where you'll be 285 days from now at 2 pm? Researchers have developed a new tracking software that can tell you exactly where you will be on a precise time and date years into the future.

Adam Sadilek , formerly of Microsoft 

John Krumm

       
        They used information from a pool of 300 volunteers in the Seattle metro area, Sadilek and Krumm  gathered a mountain of location data.

           
             As the volunteers went about their daily lives — going to work, to the grocery store, out for a jog, even for transcontinental travel — each carried a GPS device much the same way they carried a cell phone, Fast Company Magazine reported. The researchers also installed GPS devices in commercial shuttles and transit vans that the volunteers used regularly, and the volunteers' own vehicles, to further ensure accuracy.

           After collecting over 150 million location points, the researchers then had Far Out, the first system of its kind to predict long term human mobility in a unified way, parse the data. Far Out does not need to be told exactly what to look for — it automatically discovered regularities in the data.

           "For example, it might notice that Tuesdays and Thursdays are usually about the same and fairly consistent from week to week. Then when we ask about a future Tuesday or Thursday, the algorithm automatically produces a typical Tuesday/Thursday as a prediction," they said.

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