A personal need to solve a real-life problem.
It all began a couple of years ago, nearly to the date, when I was invited to an interesting meeting to develop a degree programme at my old university. At the time, I was working for my previous company that developed and sold tailored solutions for ERP systems.
Other meeting attendees included some 15 professionals and decision-makers from various organizations. To me, that translated as a fair amount of interesting contacts, leads and potential partners and a possibility to do business. However, as the meeting got into a flying start, I was left wondering who in the room actually was the person mentioned in the meeting invitation.
During the meeting, I played around with my brand-new iPad and could not help wondering what kind of an app would be perfect for a meeting setting like that. I jotted down the following thoughts and requirements:
- Meeting attendees are more than names in the invitation: they are individuals with unique personalities and interests, representing a specific organization and its values and needs.
- Integration with existing tools is essential; I want to get information from my calendar or other enterprise systems.
- How to put existing data at your fingertips when you need it; static data becomes outdated very quickly?
- While information is power, writing on an iPad is painful. What is the easiest way to take meeting notes?
- What information about the meeting attendees is available on the Web?
The need to find a good solution became even more apparent when I returned to my office. I should have put the 15 new contacts and leads to our CRM, right? But, how to do that in practice? And, more importantly, when would I have the time?
I’m not sure if it was me or our company management, but the efficient use of our CRM system really wasn’t one of my key competences. And, being the geek that I am, it felt really inefficient to manually collect and enter data that is already digitally available somewhere. And what if some of the contacts had already been in our CRM?
I believe that the scenario I’ve just described is very common in a number of professional organizations.
There are so many meetings, no-one has the time do background checks on attendees, data is scattered all over, meeting minutes are never sent. Admit it, you know this all too well.
What was the result of my meeting? The need to solve this problem kept nagging me. I even talked to a couple of colleagues about it. We decided to do something about it. And, today, we are proud to solve the problem with a solution we named Meeting Assistant.
Hannu Alakangas
CEO of Punos Mobile Ltd