On Monday morning, version 1.4 of Sunrise hit the iOS App Store and with it comes even more useful integration features that help make Sunrise an easy-to-use, all-encompassing, dynamic snapshot of your day.

In addition to integrating Facebook, Google Calendar and LinkedIn into the app (and local weather and birthdays) Sunrise is adding two more: Foursquare and Crunchbase.

The Foursquare integration is no surprise: Sunrise founders Pierre Valade and Jeremy Le Van are former Foursquare designers. What this will mean for Sunrise users is that check-ins to the Foursquare app on your iPhone will show up retroactively on your Sunrise calendar. So if you ended up at a great late-night spot you can’t remember the name of — but you checked in on Foursquare — if you look back at Sunrise for that day, you’ll see where you were and when.

The Crunchbase integration is aimed at business users. The database of companies will be available right inside the app. So if you’ve entered the name of the company you’re meeting with in Sunrise it will call up additional data about that person/company without forcing you to leave the app.

There’s also going to be a slightly better way of displaying Google Maps information: instead of selecting your meeting’s location and getting pushed out to the Google Maps app, you can now see the location on a map right inside Sunrise.

It’s a small update overall, but I like how quickly the team responded to Apple’s notable advance in native calendaring.

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Donna is the name of a new iOS app that blends location services, calendaring, reminders and push notifications to embody an actual personal assistant that keeps your schedule for you. It was created by the four founders at San Francisco’s Incredible Labs: former Twitter product lead Kevin Cheng, along with Scott San Filippo, Arshad Tayyeb and Spence Murray, who arrived from Gracenote, DoubleTwist and Netscape, respectively.

Siri is a voice-powered assistant — you ask Siri questions about anything, from directions to making reservations for dinner. Donna’s creators are less focused on search; this app asks the questions and triest to anticipate what you need before you even have to ask what’s next on your personal schedule.

In developing the app, they talked to personal assistants, executive assistants, and people who employ them to understand the attributes that makes for a good assistant. They didn’t just pick a random woman’s name — the app is named after an iconic television assistant: Donna Moss, the assistant to the Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Lyman on The West Wing –  and someone they think reflects the best qualities of a person in that position: proactive, strong, intelligent, Cheng said.

“Good assistants seem to be people who, you ask them something, and they give the information back to you,” Cheng told me in a call earlier this week. “But really great assistants are the ones that are a step ahead of you and gave you the information before you realized you even needed it.”

In that way Donna shares similarities with Google Now — which is Android-only at the moment. That’s a search product, but it also uses location and user habits to anticipate what you want. But it doesn’t quite mimic the schedule-keeping of an assistant.

Putting an app to work for you

Based on all the stuff she does, it’s clear Donna is intended for really busy people — people who use an app like AnyDO or Wunderlist may see similarities, but with an added proactive element. It takes your appointment details from your phone’s calendar, uses your contacts, your location and the location of where you need to be next to tell you where and when you need to leave to make your next appointment on time. It cuts out fiddling with your phone to figure out directions, the weather or what’s coming next on your calendar.

It does other things to mimic a real human assistant too: you get a push notification when it’s time to leave for your next meeting; you get an update at the end of the day about what’s on the schedule for tomorrow; and if it’s raining at the location you’re heading too it’ll let you know to bring an umbrella.

But the app is designed so that you actually don’t spend that much time in it: you simply get a notification for what’s next (or a call, which is in the works). And in order to not be annoying it only notifies you with something that immediately needs your attention — time to leave, time to get on a Skype call or Webex discussion, time to wake up, etc.

From there it does a lot of work for you: swipe the notification for a conference call and it will not only automatically dial you in, it will put in the conference code and mute you as well — to mimic a personal assistant dialing you in.

The app is free and the company won’t have any ads in Donna — the info you share with your personal assistant should stay personal, Cheng said — but they do have a business plan in mind: subscription access. But that’s only if they can make themselves “valuable” enough someday to charge, he said.

Donna is launching in private beta starting Thursday, so you’ll have to sign up for an invitation. Cheng says he hopes to open the app to the public soon after.

Incredible Labs has raised $2.5 million in seed funding so far from Khosla Ventures, Betaworks, Maynard Webb, Crunchfund, Ashton Kutcher and others.

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Sunrise was initially launched as an email newsletter by a duo of former Foursquare user interface designers last year. But they decided to take the same idea — an overview of your day created by aggregating all the various calendars you  have, whether from Google, LinkedIN or Facebook — and make it into an app that users can go back to throughout the day to check on their upcoming schedule and appointments.

Below is a video where I walk through how the app works and why I think it’s a good app for those hunting for a mobile calendar app that’s slightly more sophisticated than the default app that comes standard on the iPhone.

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Tempo’s new app uses many of the same artificial intelligence technologies that went into Siri to generate a smart calendar that infers appointment details and context from your other social media and messaging services. Tempo parses all of the data in a customer’s email accounts, address books and LinkedIn and Foursquare profiles in the cloud using Amazon Web Services. That’s where it ran into problems.

The Tempo AI team

According to CEO Raj Singh, it takes a huge amount of computing resources to bring new customer online. Its platform must initially cull through all of the data in the customer’s various email and social media accounts. Once the customer is on-boarded the burden on the AI lessens, though it does reprocess all of that data on a regular basis – any time new email or contact data is added to system, Tempo can generate new semantic links between new data and old.

“There is just generally a ton of CPU to make all of this work; processing data takes time and we don’t get a network effect, since we have to process each individual’s data,” Singh said in an email. “We re-process data constantly; to be semantically relevant and contextual, we’re constantly re-processing, this is very expensive (it’s like Google constantly re-crawling)”

Tempo was not only surprised by the sheer volume of new registrants – last week Tempo estimated it had a backlog of more than 100,000, but it now believes that number is conservative – it was also caught off guard by the amount of data each customer had. Singh said the average customer is linking 2.5 email accounts to their calendar. Tempo’s servers are getting slammed in both directions: they’re processing more new customers than expected and each new customer has much more information than anticipated.

That led to Tempo’s decision to put a halt to new activations for the next few days. It will finish parsing all of the current email accounts for those who have successfully registered, and it has submitted to Apple an update to its iPhone app that contains a built-in reservation system (right now the app simply won’t let you sign up). Once the reservation system is in place, it will begin allowing new customers in gradually as CPU resources allow. (Update: the new version of the iPhone app is now live on iTunes.)

Of course, since Tempo’s platform is hosted in AWS, it could simply buy more CPU time to get over the hump. Singh said he wouldn’t go into the details for competitive reasons of how Tempo is managing its backend, except to say that the amount of computing resources it needs to overcome the backlog would be very expensive. Plus, once Tempo brings all of these new customers on board, the demands on its servers will drop considerably.

Tempo certainly isn’t the only smart calendar app in the market. On Tuesday, Sunrise debuted a new smart calendar app, which my colleague Erica Ogg just wrote about in detail. Meanwhile, personal data search startup Cue (formerly Greplin) has been offering an intelligent calendar since June.

Because of Tempo AI’s pedigree from SRI and its associations with Siri, though, its app was always going to get a lot of attention (some rave reviews about the app also helped). Customers haven’t responded kindly to Tempo’s delays though. Of the 597 reviews on iTunes today, 435 were one-star skewerings. Tempo said that once the reservation system in place, it’s hoping it can do a better job explaining the reasons for the delay.

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It’s not that the email product wasn’t doing well, they had 20,000 people signed up for it, founder Pierre Valade told me in a phone call from their New York City headquarters last week. But, “people were saying, ‘This is cool in the morning. But it’s hard to go back and find it throughout the day’ because they get so much email.”

He and his cofounder, Jeremy Le Van, realized people were looking for more than what the Sunrise email was designed for. “We were like, it’s not really meant to be read twice, or three times. We had the idea that if we had an app, people would be able to go back to it, so we decided to replace the calendar.”

A culturally current analogy to understand the difference between the original and new Sunrise: On House of Cards, the congressmen get printouts from their assistants of their entire daily schedules first thing in the morning; that’s what Sunrise was meant to be originally. As an app, the better metaphor for Sunrise on iOS is having that assistant follow you through the day, adding and deleting things on the schedule as they come up and giving you all the important, personal details on who you’re meeting with and where. The app is not just a schedule, but a full-on calendar that knows a lot about you and the people you’re meeting with.

Its smarts come from how Sunrise is connected: not only can you link up your Google calendars, both personal and professional, you can sync Sunrise with LinkedIN and Facebook. This allows Sunrise to know all of your planned meetings and events, but also who your contacts are, how you know them, and when their birthdays are. The way Sunrise has implemented all this information is with some delightful design flourishes. As you might imagine from guys who cut their teeth on mobile apps at Foursquare, design and the user experience are high priorities here.

The top of the screen is where you take care of your settings, a simple “+” sign lets you quickly add events in the app — the mechanics are very similar to adding events to the stock iOS Calendar app. In the center bar is an icon that has a number badge showing if you have new event invitations. Below that is a calendar that you can scroll through an adjustable window to find the date you want.

But most of the screen is taken up by the day view of the calendar. There is where you see the close attention to detail Sunrise’s designers have dwelled on. For example, next to each meeting event is a small profile picture of the meeting attendants; a small gift icon lists birthdays that day along with their Facebook profile shot. You can click on the person’s picture, and you’re given the option to post a birthday message on their Facebook wall right from the app, or — if you have them in your iOS contacts — text them a private “happy birthday.” Similarly, when a location is listed in an appointment, a map pin appears that lets you, in two clicks, jump to directions in the maps app of your choice — Google’s or Apple’s. If the appointment is a Skype call, the Skype icon appears in the list view; if it’s a lunch meeting, a food icon will appear. Each weekend also helpfully includes temperature forecasts for your location, along with small icons representing the forecast for each day.

Now, replacing the iPhone calendar is quite a popular undertaking these days. I wrote last month about Fantastical, which is much simpler and focuses more on helping you quickly add events to your calendar through natural language processing. Last week, Tempo debuted from the same folks behind Siri – it’s a smart calendar that uses artificial intelligence technology to learn about you and infer information about events and meetings based on past behaviors and other context. There’s also a handful of others, like Cue, from Greplin, which is a combination calendar and personal assistant — it integrates not just appointments and meetings but tracks travel info, package deliveries and more.

Sunrise is betting that its focus on using design to make a beautiful app that appeals to users’ emotions, and on making the user experience easy by not having to jump between a lot of different apps, will help it rise above the rest.

The email product was a side project when Valade and Le Van were at Foursquare; to pursue building the mobile app, they’ve struck out on their own. They are currently self-funded, but will be looking for funding soon to continue building out both the app and the standalone email product.

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The software is pretty simple; you just enter a date on one of the three tabs to track days left, days past, or days until someone’s birthday. You can easily customize the title of what you’re tracking and the events can be added to your native calendar app or be set to repeat.

My main purpose for finding and using D-Day is my running streak, which I began on January 1, 2011. Today, for example, is my 400th consecutive day of running at least a mile. I need the daily counter that D-Day provides me for my running log. For additional fun, I keep track of my age in days. The app tells me that today I woke up for the 15,524th day. My kids swear I don’t look a day over 15,000, so the running must be helping.

Although my primary purpose for D-Day is my running streak, I’ve found it can be useful for so much more. People who stopped smoking and want to keep track of how long since that last light-up can use D-Day. Maybe you want to track how long it’s been since a quiet date with your significant other. (Trust me mobile younglings, this becomes important as date-night frequency drops off once you’ve been alive for that first 10,000 days!) Or perhaps you have a goal to lose 10 pounds in 100 days; D-Day can be your iOS countdown buddy for that or an upcoming project.

The free version of D-Day is ad-supported and there’s an in-app purchase option to go Pro for $0.99. The lite version is working just fine for me as I’ve used it daily for the last 400 days.

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First, BusyCal doesn’t have that annoying faux leather iPad style interface. It retains an unadorned look more in line with older versions of iCal. There are hacks to return your iCal to classic mode, but sensible good looks isn’t the only thing BusyCal is offering.

BusyCal supports direct syncing of calenders between computers, and if you desire, can bypass the cloud altogether. Otherwise the app supports syncing to any CalDAV service such as MobileMe as well as Google. Setting up Google Calendar sycning is a breeze. You put in your credentials and away you go. Your calendars instantly appear. Lion’s iCal requires a few additional steps to add multiple calendars, which is both annoying and unnecessary.

In iCal for Lion, the calendar list floats on top of your calendar, making it near impossible to view both it and your calendar list. BusyCal retains a unique column for your entire calendar list, as well as a month at-a-glance view (mini-month). Although BusyCal doesn’t have iCal’s yearly view, it does have a list view of all your upcoming events, regardless of when they fall, and can integrate daily events into an optional icon on the menu bar. This is a handy feature to answer the basic question of where you have to be today.

Other nice features in BusyCal include the ability to add graphics to an event, as well as sticky notes and custom banners. These features will even sync with other BusyCal users, but won’t sync with your iPhone or Android device. Best of all is that BusyCal will show you the daily forecast with highs and lows right on the day in question.

Although Lion introduced some great new features, iCal is one giant step backwards in my opinion. BusyCal on the other hand retains great features from Snow Leopard’s iCal, while adding some new ones as well. BusyCal is sold directly for via the Mac App Store for $49.99 ($79.99 for a family pack), which is more than Lion costs as a whole, but the price of entry may be worth it to users that once relied on some iCal features that are no longer there.

Disclosure: Busymac provided a copy of BusyCal for review purposes.

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TouchBase automatically works with your iPhone’s built-in calendar, so you don’t have to sign up for a new service or port all your appointments. And like Siri, it’s smart; TouchBase’s intelligence is a very specific kind of smarts, however, one designed to take the busywork out of maintaining a detailed and highly interactive digital appointment book.

When you create appointments (either in your Calendar app itself, or in-app through TouchBase), the TouchBase software parses your brief description and comes up with two kinds of crucial information: who’s involved, and where things are taking place. So, for instance, I can type (or dictate using Siri, if I prefer) “Lunch with Ian D. at Kenzo,” set the time and day, and be completely done with the appointment-making process. From that, TouchBase will automatically find the correct contact information for the person involved (Ian D. in this case) and set the location, provided I’ve given it enough info to find a likely match in Google Maps.

With that information, TouchBase can quickly perform a number of functions. Using special macros, it can text people you’re meeting with a pre-configured message to let them know you’re at the agreed-upon meeting location, or that you’ll be late. You can also call and email your contacts with just a couple taps, and look up the meeting place via your iPhone’s Google Maps app.

For me, filling out the various fields in my Calendar app when making a new appointment is just too time-consuming in terms of the reward you get back. With TouchBase, however, a simple one line event descriptor takes care of all the heavy lifting for me, so I can just focus on keeping track of things I have to do, without it becoming a huge production.

So is TouchBase more helpful than Siri when it comes to scheduling? Actually, it turns out the two combined are an unstoppable force. I’ll dictate appointments to Siri, who records them in my calendar, which then feeds to TouchBase, where I can use its smart macros to stay in touch with folks I’m meeting and look up venues. Even without direct integration, this is how Siri combined with other apps really does equal magic.

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My 10 tips cover three important dimensions: Technology settings and strategies, our developing calendaring etiquette and norms, and broader organizational practices.

Technology settings and strategies

1. Set up appointment slots. Many systems (I’m most familar with Tungle.me and Google Calendar) let you choose the times others can book you.
2. Make your wishes known. Many systems let you add comments on the page where people would schedule you, so use those comments to share your preferences for scheduling meetings. On my scheduling page I ask that people request at least three options, across multiple days.
3. Set your default meeting time to a smaller increment. This great tip comes from Thursday Bram. I just changed my default meeting time to 15 minutes. She also challenges us to:
4. Schedule your own time so you can get some work done. My own technique is to schedule my required events (with prep, travel, and assimilation time added on), block time for work, and then negotiate the shared aspect of my calendar. You may not have that kind of control, but as you’ll see in the the organizational practices category of tips, you won’t have this kind of control unless you ask.
5. Check the other person’s schedule first. Before asking someone if you can book some time (see next tip below), search the system for times that might work. You’ll get an better idea of the how busy the person is and be ready to book using their technology of choice.

Etiquette and norms

6. Get an OK before you set the meeting. Don’t book someone else without prior correspondence, unless it is standard operating practice, or the person’s scheduling page says you can.
7. Offer multiple options. If your calendar system allows it, suggest a few different meeting times, spread across multiple days — you never know where the person will be and whether or not they’ll have access to a computer, good wifi, or whatever else the event might need.
8. Don’t schedule back-to-back events. The person will be more likely to be on time and have your agenda in mind if you give them some breathing room. Try and schedule for an “odd” time so others are less likely to schedule immediately before or after your meeting.

Organizational practices

9. Talk about calendering and meeting ideals. Come to agreement around norms for booking each other, how personal time can be blocked, and assumptions about meetings. Agree on when it’s ok to say no to a meeting.
10. Enlist IT’s help. See if your information technology gurus can adjust the calendaring system to defaults of 15, 25, or 55 minutes, to help shorten meetings (or at least allow 5 minutes’ breathing room between them). If this isn’t a standard setting, see if IT can ask the vendor to implement it as a new feature.

Certainly, we’ve had shared calendars inside organizations for years. That doesn’t mean we’ve done calendaring well or that we’re prepared for public calendar sharing.

Would be great to know how these tips have worked out for you. Please share other tips you’ve found to be valuable.

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As you can see in the video, the iCloud apps (running in the latest version of Safari on OS X Lion) look a lot like the redesigned Address Book and Calendar apps from Lion, as does the Mail app from screenshots I’ve seen. Apple’s decision to go for a unified look and feel between the web-based iCloud presence, Mac apps and iOS software is a great idea for encouraging adoption of cloud services among users new to the concept. One experience, no matter where you access from, really helps the learning curve and should help alleviate any concerns about privacy and security of access.

One other really nice feature about the iCloud.com beta: it appears to remember where you are when last you left off, even if you last logged in from a different computer, and delivers you right back to that same spot the next time you log in. It’s sort of like having Lion’s Auto Resume feature on the web.

Apple has definitely stepped up its game compared to MobileMe. Do you see yourself using iCloud on the web when it becomes available to the general public this September?

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