Flexibits, the company behind popular calendar app Fantastical, is releasing Fantastical 3.0 on all platforms today — macOS, iOS, iPadOS and watchOS. New features include event proposals, interesting calendars, new calendar views and weather forecasts.

I’ve been using the app on my Mac, iPhone and iPad for a week. The main difference with Fantastical 2 is that the app is now exactly the same across all platforms. You’ll find the same feature set, the same interface and the same calendar-syncing engine in all those apps.

“Think about it as one app and one platform that’s called Fantastical,” Flexibits co-founder Michael Simmons told me.

Now that Fantastical is a unified platform, Flexibits is also switching to a unified pricing model. All apps are free with basic features and you have to subscribe to unlock everything. The free version doesn’t support adding tasks, adding events using the natural language parsing engine, etc.

The Mac app used to cost $49.99, the iPhone app used to cost $9.99 and the iPad app used to cost $4.99. Now, you can subscribe for $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year to unlock apps on all platforms.

If you’ve been using Fantastical 2 in the past, you’ll keep all Fantastical 2 features, with a few additions. You still have to subscribe to unlock the full feature set.

While the interface of the Mac app hasn’t changed much, the iPhone app is getting a nice design update. In addition to dark mode, you can now swipe up and down on the top area to switch from the default DayTicker view to a month view and to a full-screen vertical view.

That full-screen vertical view is a great addition. For instance, you can see a week view without having to rotate your phone to landscape, a month view with events details and a year view to quickly jump to another date.

I customized the full-screen week view to display the next four days so that I get larger columns and I can more easily see the details of my events. That view reminds me of Sunrise’s week view, a well-designed calendar app that shut down four years ago.

In the week and day view, you can also zoom in and out by pinching the screen. It’s a great way to see more details or see more hours. Overall, it’s a fluid user experience and I’m sure power users are going to love swiping their fingers across the screen.

Scheduling and a renewed focus on tasks

When it comes to new features, Fantastical now has a built-in meeting proposal feature. When you create an event, you can add other options if you haven’t decided on a specific time just yet. You can see all proposed events in your calendar with a “Proposed” label and your invitee receives an email with event details. When they select a date and time, your proposed events are replaced by a single event.

This feature works with a server back end. And Flexibits didn’t stop there with server-side features. For instance, one of the key features of Fantastical is calendar sets. That feature lets you toggle multiple calendars and task lists and save those settings as a specific view. Your calendar sets now sync across all your devices.

Task management has also been improved. In addition to iCloud Reminders support, Fantastical now also supports task lists in Todoist and Google Tasks.

There’s a new feature called interesting calendars. Google Calendar users are familiar with that feature — it lets you add calendars for holidays, sports, TV, quarterly earnings, etc. The company has partnered with SchedJoules for those calendars.

Finally, you can enable weather forecasts in Fantastical. You can click on weather icons in the DayTicker or week view to check the weather in the coming days. If you’re traveling, you can also open an event to see the weather in that location at the time of your event. The company has partnered with AccuWeather for that feature.

Refining existing features

Flexibits is also using this opportunity to improve some of its most popular features. For instance, the natural language parsing engine has been updated. That feature lets you create events by typing a sentence. For instance, you can say “Team meeting tomorrow at 3pm” to create an event for tomorrow at 3pm called “Team meeting.”

Fantastical now automatically looks up names in your address book to add attendees. For instance, if you type “Lunch with Sarah on Monday at 1pm”, you get a drop-down menu and you can select Sarah in your contacts. She’ll be added as an attendee and receive a calendar invitation. Fantastical also tries to guess locations using the same system.

The natural language parsing engine also supports recurring events, selecting a specific calendar and adding alerts to your events. You can also create tasks by writing “todo Buy baguette tomorrow” for instance.

Another feature that is a nice quality-of-life improvement is Google Hangouts Meet and Zoom support. When you create an event, you can generate a Google Hangouts Meet or Zoom link to create a video-conferencing room associated to your event.

Behind the scene, the iPhone and iPad apps have received a huge upgrade as they now fetch your calendar data directly. They don’t rely on Apple’s calendar engine. Fantastical has a built-in calendar engine, just like the Mac app, which means the iOS app is no longer constrained by Apple’s API.

A new foundation

Switching to a subscription model is a risky move for Fantastical. The app now features live content with weather data and interesting calendars. And Flexibits has to pay those data partners to get this information.

But the main reason why a subscription makes sense is that the old paid app model doesn’t work anymore. Flexibits wants to ship updates more regularly instead of waiting two or three years in order to release a paid update with a ton of new features at once.

Fantastical 3.0 looks like a great foundation to build upon. Sure, subscribing to a calendar isn’t for everyone. But a ton of iPhone users looking for a free calendar app are going to download Fantastical now that it’s a free download.

And people who rely heavily on their calendar will subscribe. As a subscriber, you get a well-designed app that works so much better than Apple’s calendar app, Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Flexibits launches major Fantastical update

GoDaddy has reached an agreement to acquire Over, the startup behind an app that helps businesses create the photos and videos they need for social media.

Justin Tsai, GoDaddy’s vice president of growth and product, said this acquisition is about acknowledging “a world of entrepreneurs who may never have a website.”

He told me, “Over’s capabilities really target those set of people, who may have an Instagram profile where they need to post visually engaging content but have never gone to GoDaddy.”

This follows GoDaddy’s relaunch of its website-building tools last fall under the new name Websites+Marketing, with additional features around email marketing, search engine optimization and maintaining a presence beyond your website, whether that’s on Facebook or Yelp.

Tsai said Websites+Marketing now has 1 million paying customers, but as more business started using it, “We started noticing users really had trouble creating great content as they go to those platforms. They didn’t know what to post or how to make that post really sing.”

That’s where Over comes in, offering a variety of customizable templates and layouts that should make it faster and easier to create eye-catching visual content. The goal, according to co-founder and CEO Matt Winn, is to “build guitars, not violins” — in the same way that someone can pick up a guitar and “strum a few cords,” they should be able to download Over and quickly “start creating really great content.”

In fact, the startup says it has more than 1 million active users of its own, who are using it to create more than 220,000 projects every day.

Tsai said GoDaddy and Over were initially discussing a partnership, but as it became clear that there was an opportunity to integrate the products more deeply, those discussions led to acquisition talks.

Over will continue to operate as a standalone app, and he said the team will continue to develop new features for the app. At the same time, they’ll be building integrations with Websites+Marketing, for example by taking Over and connecting it “into our insights tool to understand how different elements of [online] presence layer in together, to look at templates and how those actually help different types of small business owners.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Winn said Over had previously raised funding from True Ventures and angel investors, and that the entire 76-person team will be joining GoDaddy. Over will continue to operate out of its Cape Town, South Africa headquarters.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | GoDaddy continues to expand beyond websites by acquiring social content startup Over

Less than six months after it announced $40 million in funding, Attentive has raised another $70 million — this time in Series C funding.

The new round was led by Sequoia and IVP, two firms that were part of the Series B. Previous investors Eniac Ventures and NextView Ventures also participated.

CEO Brian Long (who, along with his Attentive co-founder Andrew Jones, sold his previous startup TapCommerce to Twitter) told me that he wasn’t planning to raise money again so soon, but things were going even better than expected, with a client list that has grown to more than 750 businesses, including Coach, Urban Outfitters, CB2, PacSun, Party City and Jack in the Box.

Long noted that it’s always smarter to raise money when things are going swimmingly, rather than dealing with the “not-so-fun process” of trying to raise “when you really need it.”

He added, “When you see that you’re doing that well, you think, ‘Hey, we should hire a lot more people to support this growth.’ And then the other piece is just being able to move faster into new areas.”

Long attributed the success Attentive has had thus far to the growing importance of text messages as a channel for businesses to reach consumers, particularly as those consumers are less inclined to open marketing emails or download retailers’ mobile apps. And in contrast to broader messaging platforms, Long said Attentive is “focused on just doing this channel right.”

He said the platform is designed to solve the main problems faced by retailers trying to build a mobile messaging strategy — first, by helping them create a text subscriber list in a way that complies with regulations, then by offering “the ability to send messages that frankly aren’t going to piss people off.”

“We want the messages to be relevant for the consumer, we want to send them things that they care about,” Long said. “The package is on the way, real-time customer service, a product that you were looking at recently is on-sale … there’s a lot of data that you can put to work in order to do it at scale.”

Looking ahead, he hopes to expand beyond the United States and Canada, and to move into industries beyond e-commerce — for example, into more traditional retail, and also to start working with colleges that are looking to attract more applicants.

“Attentive’s growth is a clear indication that people want to interact with brands in new ways, and brands are embracing messaging as an effective way to reach consumers,” said Sequoia partner Pat Grady in a statement. “We are thrilled to double down on our partnership with Attentive so they can continue to deliver fantastic results for their customers and valuable experiences for consumers.”

Attentive has now raised a total of $124 million.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Mobile messaging startup Attentive raises another M

Y Combinator graduate OpenPhone is raising a $2 million funding round led by Slow Ventures. The company is working on an app that lets you seamlessly get a business phone number without a second phone or a second SIM card.

Y Combinator, Kindred Ventures, Garage Capital, 122WEST Ventures and others are also participating in today’s funding round.

Compared to Aircall and other enterprise solutions, OpenPhone targets small and medium companies that want a mobile-first, easy-to-use solution to take advantage of a second phone number.

For instance, if you’re a freelancer and you hate handing out your personal phone number, OpenPhone lets you separate your personal and professional life more easily.

OpenPhone works on iPhone, iPad and Android. You also can use a web interface to interact with the app from your computer. It currently costs $10 per month per user. For that price, you get a local number, a toll-free number or you can port an existing phone number. Five thousand people are using OpenPhone right now.

You can then use that number for unlimited calls and texts in the U.S. and Canada. Behind the scene, OpenPhone uses your internet connection to establish voice-over-IP calls.

The startup has been working on collaborative features so you can use OpenPhone with multiple users. For instance, you can share a phone number with other users so your team can answer text messages faster and pick up the phone more often. The company has also launched a Slack integration that lets you receive a notification when somebody calls or texts your phone number.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | OpenPhone grabs million for its business phone number app