As was explained to me by a friend who founded a recently-acquired to-do list company, the opportunity is to monetize intent. That is, if my to-do is "take clothes to dry cleaning," the app might be able to suggest a better/closer dry cleaner. You can also imagine many similar opportunities around travel.
Yeah, I'm not going to be installing this. I've been paying for RTM Pro (Android) for a couple of years, but it's expensive and doesn't quite fit my workflow so I've been looking at alternatives. Not interested in what looks like invasive vaporware.
I have paid for RTM pro for years. It is money well spent every year. I have met the developer of the Any.do app, and he's a good guy. Vaporware it is not. But for an app I interact with multiple times every single day I have no problem paying money to avoid advertisements.
They use missed calls to make reminders, and they seem to allow you to link a number to a task to ring it. Not necessarily outrageous if what their website suggests it does is true.
Customers, skills, and market position (as the go-to todo app) are all contributing factors. I think they intend to expand the scope of the services they deliver -- collect data and hopefully, sell out to a larger company.
I would guess the money is based on speculation that a larger company (dropbox, google, facebook) would purchase your company and add your feature to their existing product.
None of the comments make sense because the title was changed.. wtf mods
To answer the original question: because Yahoo! recently paid millions for the Astrid TODO list and is shutting it down, and VCs figure Google might want bragging rights over Yahoo! by buying a better one for even more money and shutting it down.