crazy crazy news notion has acquired the new next generation calendar application kron it's a wild a
bit of news in the last 24 hours today i wanted to unpack that acquisition and what it means for the
future of notion so if you're new here welcome my name is francesco please do subscribe and
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story began a year ago when ivan the ceo of notion started using cron the next generation calendar
application as his go-to calendar experience and he built a good relationship with the creator of
kron raphael scout and essentially they believe that this acquisition is really um basically a
good match for them both notions saying that they want to also focus on synchronous communication
tools um for example synchronous could well be video messaging calendar things that you're using
sort of in real time whereas they traditionally focus a lot on asynchronous communication so it
could potentially hinted more acquisitions in the future that best suits that criteria
so they have now partnered um although cron will be available for the foreseeable future they're
sort of near enough future until they have what's called a shared vision and brand notion will be
taking over kron and likely most of the team that are building it in the background so what
does this actually mean for notion well i have a few thoughts on that the first is that i think
they will pay more attention to their calendar and gans experience inside the application for teams
and individuals now one of those i would say their least desirable experiences in the database views
is the calendar experience it's not necessarily designed very nicely and people have been asking
things like day and week view for quite a long while now and it's something that i'm sure
their integration and their new engineering team that maybe potentially behind this will actually
implement now they have cron the second is the scheduling function as i said um they obviously
want to focus more on synchronous communication and one of those methods is actually to be able
to connect your calendar and then be able to schedule and send availability links as well
and that's something that cron actually does right now and probably something that notion
will likely take more advantage of bringing that experience over right now if you wanted to plan
something you could embed a calendar link in there or maybe even an embed a page that would view a
calendar link but that's really it and it's not really synchronous but if you and your team are
organizing meetings this could be something that would be better in the future the third thing and
something i'm just so sort of going on a wild guess with is the command bar this is something
inside of cron that you can do to quickly access certain features and be able to quickly draw it up
and find anything you need what's nice about the command barracks is beautifully designed and it's
pretty rapid to use something that notion haven't really taken full advantage of although you have
the search bar which does have some great features i think in the future with synchronous tools being
able to book a meeting through the command bar could be something that notion would like to see
command bar is getting incredibly popular in applications as people look to spend a bit
more time on them and notion could definitely do with a bit of dose of that for sure so there
are the three areas i think we'll see kron in bed inside of notion um it's really interesting
because notions hit that point that sort of large company mark where obviously it's starting to
acquire companies and i just thought it was funny when i saw them and acquire calendar because i
was like oh my god they've got to that point big companies tend to acquire calendar applications
calendar applications and email applications are typically the applications that people spend the
least on um and actually cost quite a lot to run so we typically spend a lot of money on task and
project and notes app versus them because we see more tangible results compared to them but it's
great to see this acquisition as notion look to embed great design inside our application which is
something they've done from day one and also great engineering of what raphael has built over at cron
so super interesting news what do you think they're going to do feel free to share it in the
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