Meetings between professionals always go most smoothly when both parties are familiar with each other. There’s nothing more awkward than having the wrong idea about a company or individual while you’re in a meeting with them. It’s best to be prepared to speak with whomever you’re scheduled to meet with, to know about their job and their accomplishments as well as any other bits of information that can be used as jumping off points for conversation. Before, achieving this level of preparation would have taken painstaking research, too much time spent on websites with too little or too much information. Now, you can just use Charlie.

The ultimate preparation tool for busy professionals

Charlie acts as a form of digital personal assistant, providing background information about other professionals prior to the beginning of a meeting. Charlie delivers its information in the form of a one-pager, which details the most relevant information about a person’s company, recent news, accomplishments and other shared interests. It’s a quick, effective research tool that helps you stay one step ahead in terms of preparation.

Thorough Google research

The app searches hundreds of social media applications and websites in order to compile its information. It relates all of that information with context to your own life, so shared interests on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn are both displayed. Charlie also scans company websites, recent news articles and company databases in order to provide an additional level of important but difficult-to-find information.

Automatic research and reminders

The app does this automatically whenever you have a meeting scheduled, saving you time that you would otherwise spend researching and ensuring that you don’t forget to brush up on your facts. An hour before each meeting, Charlie delivers the data to your e-mail in the form of a one-page document. The document, which maintains the same format each time you receive an e-mail from Charlie, contains a combination of photos and text as well as an organizational structure that makes everything more easily understandable.

Powerful, but secure

Although Charlie is currently marketed towards business professionals, the service it provides obviously does raise some security questions. In the wrong hands, Charlie could be used to uncover information about individuals to be used for malicious purposes. But in 2014 if there’s anything online that you don’t want anyone else to see, that’s your own fault. Charlie is essentially an extremely meticulous Google user, as all of the information the app compiles is pulled using that search engine. It’s just a more powerful way of searching.

For the niche service Charlie provides now, the app is great. It can search in the right places to uncover the right information for the specific purpose of preparing professionals for meetings with other people. It will be interesting to see whether the technology to conduct a robust Google search and visually display the results is something that could be used for purposes aside from business meetings. For now, the service that it provides is undeniably valuable.