Ideas Happen. Share Them While They're Hot.
Doing ad-hoc meetings via iPad 3G
Today I received my new shiny iPad 3G. It is a beautiful toy. The entire web is a touch away.
It can also be a powerful business tool.
Suppose you are traveling. Imagine a pleasant trip on a boat. No laptops. OK, you do have an iPad, of the 3G variety, as the case may be.
Suddenly, while admiring a group of playful dolphins, you stumble upon a whale of an idea that you absolutely must tell the world about.
iPad to the rescue. You need two apps. One of them is Keynote. The other one is -- surprise, suprise -- MightyMeeting.
Step One -- create your presentation in Keynote. Step Two -- email it to upload@mightymeeting.com as PDF. Step Three -- fire up MightyMeeting and launch an online meeting.
Don’t you wish everything in the world was that easy :)
Email and Forget. Works Like a Charm.
A fast new way to upload presentations to MightyMeeting
Today we deployed a new feature that makes submitting presentations even easier.
You can now add a presentation to your MightyMeeting library by emailing it to upload@mightymeeting.com. Make sure to send it from the email address that you use to sign into MightyMeeting.
Presentations can be sent in either PDF or Microsoft PowerPoint format.
There are many uses for this new feature.
You can email a presentation to MightyMeeting directly from PowerPoint or Keynote. Email Keynote presentations in PDF format.
You may also have many presentations sitting in your inbox. Now you can easily store and index them in MightyMeeting by forwarding them to upload@mightymeeting.com.
Some of us have many email addresses.
You may choose to have a separate MightyMeeting account for each of these addresses. Email a presentation to upload@mightymeeting.com from any of them, and we will send you back a password that can be used to access your new account.
This is useful when you want to keep several separate libraries of presentations, e.g. one for work and one for the investment club.
Finally, recall that each MightyMeeting account has a unique inbox address. It looks like <something_cryptic>@mightymeeting.com. You can find it in the profile section of the MightyMeeting web interface.
All presentations sent to the account inbox address end up in the library associated with that account. Add it to your address book and use at will.
As always, all feedback and comments are much appreciated.
On Meetings and Horseless Carriages
As i am traveling the world and speaking to people about MightyMeeting, the question of "why" sometimes comes up.
Why would i want to do a meeting on a phone when i can do one perfectly well on a laptop? Good question ... My answer is simple: because you can.
Why would i want to use a cell phone if i can perfectly well place a call from a pay phone? Duh.
In a year or two, if you say to a customer "Can I call you back? I would really like to show you something but I need to boot up my laptop", you may evoke a similar reaction.
Then sometimes I get questions at the other end of the spectrum. Why would you want to apply a concept as boring as meetings to a brand new shiny thing such as iPad or iPhone? Cool gadgets require cool new apps, like checking-in at a restaurant.
Nothing against check-ins here, but guess what, you are doing meetings, your children will be doing meetings, and the children of their children will be doing meetings too ... It is what we do as the type of social animals that we are. Meetings are only boring if you meet boring people.
If history is any indication, many companies became successful by finding better ways of doing things we were already doing: getting from point A to point B, quenching thirst, or communicating.
In our industry, the opportunity to do this is particularly great when we change the platform: from mainframe to midrange, from midrange to server+desktop, from server+desktop to cloud+mobile.
There is a reason why IMS was replaced by Oracle and why Oracle is now replaced by the likes of MongoDB. It is not because Oracle cannot build a Mongo-like system. They can, but they won't.
Horse carriage companies innovate by creating horseless carriages. It is a fact of life. For awhile, a horseless carriage may look like a sure shot, but eventually you will want a bimmer. It is a pattern.
I used to be around people who play chess for a living. When you play an opening, you do not think in terms of moves, you think in terms of patterns. You see pieces on the board positioned in certain way, and you act. You can rationalize and explain the moves, but no one cares.
Right now I see a lot of horseless carriages ...
The Power of "Pitch Anywhere"
Scratching the Itch and Being Paid for It
Last week we had the pleasure of presenting at the open angel forum silicon valley. There were six carefully selected companies presenting to the who-is-who of the early stage investment community.
I can see why folks are getting a kick from this kind of gatherings. The energy in the room that was created by the combination of vision, guts, ideas, money, and brain power was enormous. You can only get this in the valley.
To me this event was special at a whole other level. We were selected from a long list of candidates. The selection process works in an interesting way. You apply online. Then at some point you get an email from the organizers that tells you that tomorrow during such and such two-hour window you will get a call. Please be ready to explain in 5 min how you are going to make the world a better place.
It just so happened that my two-hour window was smack in the middle of my fundraising tour. During that period, I would be done with one meeting and driving to the next one. Guess what, I did it. I used MM to do my pitch directly from my iPhone. The power of "Present Anywhere" at work, ladies and gentlemen. We got the deal.
Now, I've been evangelizing this kind of stuff for a long time now. Living it and seeing it work is giving me the extreme and supreme pleasure. We are definitely scratching the right itch, which according to these guys, is a very good thing.
And of course, when I did go to present in front of the audience, I presented from my iPad. Pulled up a deck from the cloud via MM and beamed it to the masses. You did not think I would use a laptop there, did you?
Doing Meetings with Nothing but an iPad
Most of us travel to do meetings. I love traveling light ... and now I can. I can walk into a meeting room with nothing but my iPad. The latest update of MightyMeeting, now in the app store, can be used to project slides to an external monitor.
With this update you can be simultaneously showing your slides to people in the room and sharing them with remote folks via an online meeting.
All you need is an iPad, MightyMeeting, and an adaptor cable.
See a brief demo video here.
Remember that MightyMeeting is fetching slides from your cloud-based library on demand and caching them locally on your device. So if you plan to do a meeting while disconnected, go through the entire slide deck at least once before the meeting while you still have a network connection. Life will be easier when iPad 3G is here later this month.
Happy Meetings!!
