MuchBeta, a portuguese startup based in Porto, has launched Yoomit, a web app for organizing meetings. I’ve gave it a try and it’s very simple and easy to use.
There is one little thing I would like to suggest.
Say I get an email from a client A in New York to schedule a meeting at 9am followed by another client B in New Zealand for a meeting at 1pm. They are both scheduling a meeting at the same time because I’m sitting in Lisbon so I’ll have to reschedule at least one of them. It would be very practical if Yoomit could make the time conversion and eventually warn of overlapping meetings. Is it too much to ask? Maybe it is but anyway here is the suggestion. Anyone else feels this pain? :)
p.s. I’ve also sent a message to the guys at MuchBeta. Let’s see if they say something.
Hi, Nuno,
My name is Fernando and I work at muchBeta.
Thank you for giving Yoomit a try and a post on your blog.
Your suggestion is actually three-fold: integrated accounts, timezone check and anti-overlapping mechanism.
The latter is obviously missing, and we'll most definitely going to implement it, as soon as possible.
The first one implies that any two people using Yoomit have some sort of interaction within the application – which is not necessarily true: they must be on the same Yoomit account.
Yoomit is a tool meant to be used within an organization. That organization chooses a (paid) pack, creates their users and starts simplifying and organizing their meetings in a better way.
Contacts outside the company (say, clients) get emails with alerts on new/rescheduled/cancelled meetings involving them (if the manager of the meeting wishes so), as well as meetings' minutes in PDF format (again, if the manager of the meeting wishes so). They don't have access to the meeting's details (other than those present in the email message) and do not take part on building the agenda.
If those contacts also use Yoomit, but in a different account, at this time there's no connection whatsoever between those accounts.
The timezone check would imply people in different timezones using the same account, which, at the moment, is not possible. The account has a timezone setting, but it's common to all users in the same account.
Yoomit was launched as simple as possible, aiming to solve the problem organizations have in organizing the agenda of their meetings and getting results from the information generated during their meetings. Each meeting agenda in Yoomit makes it all straightforward and simple with file attachments, discussion, action items, personal notes and conclusion for each agenda item, turning the generation of minutes a very simple process.
At the end, people have the minutes archived and searchable with all the conclusions that came out of the meeting and each one gets their manageable to-do list. This way, meetings can get productive and actually solve something instead of just making everyone lose valuable work time!
Cheers,
Fernando