Gist.

Ever wonder what happens to a startup after it’s acquired? Will the team continue to build and support the product, or will it be shut down? Will it be successfully integrated into another product the acquiring company built? Will the employees and founders stay on board?

Last year, 37signals wrote a blog post about Yahoo acquisitions. The post talked about how companies “get bogged down trying to overcome integration obstacles, endless meetings, and stifling bureaucracy. The products slow down or stop moving forward entirely.”

Fortunately for Gist, our first year with RIM has been a pretty good success. Sure, as we consider bringing the value of Gist to millions of Blackberry users, there are more meetings and the big company does take a bit of getting used to but Gist still lives independently on the web, in Gmail and Outlook and on other mobile devices.  Over the past year we have added some updates to Gist, but we’ve been focused on integrating the Gist ideals into the Playbook 2.0, which received rave reviews last month. We think Gary Maso said it best when he said:

“Let’s just get this out there…the PlayBook has, hands down, the best Contacts app available on any mobile platform at this time.”

Thanks Gary. We appreciate the compliment!  It’s exciting for us to see Gist integrated into the Playbook, alongside the calendar startup Tungle.me, which was acquired by RIM shortly after Gist in April 2011 and also is remaining focused on awesome calendaring scenarios and took the lead on the Calendar app on Playbook..

In case you missed it, here’s what’s new with the Playbook 2.0…

First, there’s now a native app on the device for contacts. Like Gist, the contacts app aggregates all contact information, status updates and meetings for a contact in one place. So when you open a contact, you’ll see standard contact information (including name, company, phone number, email, etc.), plus links to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The app also pulls in any current status updates from contacts on Facebook, Twitter and the contacts’ company news, allowing you to stay current on what’s going on in your contacts’ lives!

For long time Gist users, we got a special treat and have native LinkedIn integration, which is sweet.

The soft keys on the right side of the app make it easy to navigate, and include the following options: Information, Status Updates, Company Information, Shared Meetings, Shared Connections (from meetings or LinkedIn), Shared Locations (from your calendar), Favorite, Edit and Link (as pictured below, which is like Merge in Gist).

Information Tab

Status Updates

News Updates

In Common LinkedIn Connections

Upcoming Meetings

One of the many cool features of the new calendar app is that you can easily get all the same information about the people you’re meeting from within the calendar. From the people view in the calendar, you can easily view all participants’ contact info, status updates and more to help you prepare for your meeting.  Nice work Tungle team and fun to have such a tight app-app integration.

We’d love to hear your feedback on the new contacts app on the Playbook 2.0. Also, since Tungle.me still lives independently as well, we highly recommend you get started with it today if you aren’t already using it to manage your meetings!

So, while life has changed a little, we are still here, focused on building the worlds best and most innovative contacts app!  Stay tuned for more as we have lots more in store.

Also check out our latest release of Gist for BlackBerry!